VANCOUVER – Japanese farmers have been big losers in the aftermath of the 1993 world trade deal, a Japanese farm leader said last week.
Hiroshi Kono, executive director of the Japanese farm group JA Zenchu, told the annual convention of Dairy Farmers of Canada Jan. 20 that liberalized trade rules have meant fewer farmers, lower prices and falling incomes in Japanese rural areas.
He speaks for the central union of farm co-operatives in Japan.
“We have lost too much,” he said.
In some areas, freer trade has been good for the Japanese sector as inputs and better breeding stock and crop varieties have been imported to improve productivity and product variety in Japan. “We do not deny liberalization of trade itself.”
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But in commodities such as rice, imports have been displacing domestic production and reducing prices by as much as 10 percent. In the past five years, the number of dairy and livestock farmers has declined 30 percent as prices have fallen and incomes have plunged.
Kono said Japanese farmers, who demonstrated in Geneva during trade talks in 1993, have paid the price for liberalization.
Foreign exporters have gained.
And the prospects for more liberalization in the next round of World Trade Organization negotiations is for more liberalization and less protection for farmers, he said.
Liberalization of trade, rather than the welfare of farm families and rural areas and food self-sufficiency, have become the goals of trade talks.
“Japanese family farmers do not want to play a zero-sum game which ultimately ends with victory for large commercial farmers in exporting countries and defeat for family farmers in importing countries,” he said.
