Japanese farmers are often in their 70s and 80s, struggling to cultivate hillsides. In north-eastern Japan, they also face customers’ fears that their produce is radioactive. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal is the newest topic agitating them.
Nihonmatsu, Japan (dpa) – Seiju Sugeno and fellow farmers in the rugged Nihonmatsu region of north-eastern Japan have been battling with a string of problems – ageing, depopulation and radiation following the country’s worst nuclear accident five years ago.
Like other farmers in Japan, they are now worried about a possible influx of cheap imports as a result of a free-trade pact agreed in October among 12 Pacific Rim countries, including Japan and the United States.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement covers about 40 per cent of the global economy.
In early February, the signing ceremony for the deal was held in New Zealand.
“We think the region’s farming could suffer catastrophic damage” if Japan opens up its market further under the TPP, said Sugeno, a local organic farmer.
Many farmers in Nihonmatsu have been having trouble selling much of their produce due to radiation contamination soon after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, located 50 kilometres east of the city.
Radioactivity is still being detected in some mountain vegetables and mushrooms in this area.
Some local farmers have killed themselves in despair, Sugeno noted. “They were so stressed out.”
The plant went into meltdown after a tsunami swept through it in March 2011. More than 100,000 residents in the region have been unable to return to their homes due to radiation contamination.
Farmers say the fact that prices of rice and vegetables and other produce from the region is depressed is more an image problem than an effect of actual fallout. Local farmers are concerned the trade deal could further drive down their fortunes.
Japan had pledged to keep tariffs on sensitive agricultural products – rice, wheat, sugar, dairy products, and beef and pork – to protect domestic farmers. But the country ended up making many concessions, including a gradual reduction in its import tariff on beef to 9 per cent from the current 38.5 per cent in 16 years.
Japan has also agreed to provide duty-free import quotas for US and Australian rice at 50,000 tons and 6,000 tons respectively, and expand the amounts to 70,000 tons and 8,400 tons respectively, in 13 years.
The total imports at the end point, 78,400 tons, would constitute about 10 per cent of today’s annual domestic consumption.
While many Japanese farmers fiercely oppose the trade deal, Noboru Saito, another farmer in Nihonmatsu, said he supports it.
The accord “would enable us to export our products,” he said.
“Japanese farmers have long been protected” by the government, said Saito, a former Fukushima prefectural employee who started farming a year before the 2011 disaster.
Saito shuttled between his farm and Tokyo to sell his produce soon after the nuclear accident. He then opened up an internet shop to retail more vegetables and fruit grown by about 50 farmers in Fukushima.
Their revenue has dramatically increased to more than 100 million yen (more than 850,000 dollars), he said.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party once adamantly opposed the TPP. However the ruling camp now supports the deal. The premier is vowing parliament will ratify it at an early opportunity.
Masashi Takahashi, director of the Minamisanriku branch of Japan’s Agriculture Cooperative Association, said the trade deal could create a heavy drag on efforts to recover from the 2011 tsunami.
In Minamisanriku town, one of the hardest-hit areas, about 830 residents died and two-thirds of the houses were destroyed or swept away by the tidal wave. Its population has fallen 22 per cent to 13,800 since the disaster.
About 3,470 residents, or 25 per cent of the town’s population, still live in cramped temporary housing five years after the disaster.
The region has seen “very little progress” in the reconstruction, Takahashi said in a new office built on higher ground last year.
The previous office was completely destroyed by the tsunami.
Abe wants Japanese farmers to have a competitive edge to enhance Japan’s capacity to export.
However Takahashi said many of the region’s farmers are in their 70s and 80s.
“I’d like more people to appreciate such hard-working farmers,” he said with a wry smile.
That’s the bottom line, said Shigetoshi Sugata, a farmer in Sendai, the biggest city in north-eastern Japan.
Japan “has long failed to look at fundamental problems in the country’s agriculture – ageing and an issue of successors,” he said.
Takahashi said about 40 per cent of Japanese farmers are engaging in small-scale farming in hilly and mountainous areas like Minamisanriku, not large tracts of flat land.
“There has been no discussion about how they could support such farmers,” he said.
Kazuoki Ono, an author of several books on agriculture in Japan and other Asian countries, said the government and business leaders want to promote large-scale farming under the TPP.
The elimination of small-scale farmers “could lead to the collapse of local communities,” said Ono, who also serves as editor-in-chief at Nikkan Berita, an online publication.
While big exporters such as Toyota Motor “are expected to take enormous advantage of the TPP, the pact could help damage local economies in rural Japan and other Asian countries” participating in the deal, he said.
Takehiko Kambayashi 