Friday morning, as I sat in a chair at the hospital with my newborn baby daughter and my recovering-from-surgery wife, I offered thanks for the miracle of life.
That’s what made it so sickening for me to read about and see on TVs at the hospital all the death, destruction and devastation that had just occurred in Japan. I felt almost guilty to be filled with my own personal joy about our new baby when so many in Japan were feeling such overwhelming losses.
A few days after the earthquake and Tsunami the Japanese are still finding bodies, and fearing nuclear reactor meltdowns.
And that makes me feel cold-hearted this morning as I call various crop and meat groups and ask how this disaster will affect Canadian ag exports. It doesn’t seem fitting, with the human situation, to ask about commercial matters, but what happens to Japan matters greatly to us because we are major trading partners, so we need to think about that, even at this moment of tragedy.
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It doesn’t matter what prairie farm commodity you look at, Japan matters. It is a major, top-dollar buyer of Canadian wheat, canola, beef and pork. Lots of Canadian pulse crops go there.
Everyone in every ag industry I have spoken to says the same things about the Japanese: they are honest, demanding, reliable and trustworthy business partners. They buy top quality products from us for top prices – but demand that quality standards are the highest. That last point, to me, is the best thing they do for us. By being demanding, but being willing to pay for quality, they have put all the incentives in the market to make us develop our prairie industries to be quality-focused. Their expectations and trustworthiness are a big part of how we have evolved our system, so we owe them a big thank you for that.
So in a cold-hearted way, we need to care about the situation in Japan.
But many of us also have had human relationships with Japanese buyers, traders, and industry representatives, and that is what makes the present tragedy so painful for so many of us.
In my job here i often get to meet Japanese people, usually as they visit the Canadian International Grains Institute. I get to meet them,chat with them, interview them for stories. When I went back through my photo files this morning, looking for Japanese people, I found a surprising number. Here are a couple from stories in the past year or so.
I wonder how they are and will email them when I get back to the office in a few minutes. But just seeing their faces in these photographs again makes a massive tragedy very human and close. So while we in the ag world will probably focus on the financial implications to us of what is happening over there, many of us will also be thinking of those Japanese people we’ve met over the years.
