TOKYO - After years of international
pressure over farm trade liberalization, Japan now
believes the best defense is a good offense and is
avidly promoting agricultural exports as a way to
turn the tables. While still a major food
importer, the country has set a new, ambitious
goal to double exports of agricultural and marine
products amid growing concerns about food
security.
To that end, Japan is boosting
government funding to help domestic growers and
businesses with market cultivation and
export promotion programs.
The country is also beefing up efforts to
eliminate the increasingly rampant proliferation
of pirated produce varieties grown more cheaply
abroad, especially in neighboring countries, from
prized seeds developed and cultured by Japanese
farmers. Unless such cases of agricultural piracy
are nipped in the bud, not only could the growth
in a promising source of income for Japanese
farmers be stunted, but the government-led export
drive could stall.
Japan is on the
offensive in negotiations to liberalize trade in
non-farm products such as automobiles and
electronics, but is on the defensive when it comes
to agriculture. The year 2006 will be a crucial
one for the global trading system; the World Trade
Organization's ministerial meeting in Hong Kong
last month made only modest progress. Trade
ministers from 149 countries failed to strike a
deal on a framework for further liberalizing trade
in goods and services. Instead, they pledged to
work out such a deal by the end of April, in hopes
of meeting an end-2006 target deadline.
The biggest sticking point in the Doha
Round of WTO negotiations is agriculture. WTO
members remain sharply split over how much
barriers to the freer cross-border movement of
farm produce, such as national subsidies for
domestic farmers, export subsidies and high import
tariffs, should be eliminated, especially in
richer industrialized members. This question has
also pitted industrialized WTO members, including
the US, the European Union and Japan, against one
another.
As the Doha Round ticks toward
the deadline, Japan is expected to come under
stronger pressure to liberalize its heavily
protected agricultural markets. It is vehemently
resisting a proposal supported by many WTO members
to set a ceiling of 75-100% on the import tariffs
for farm products. Tokyo wants to keep those
tariffs, especially for politically sensitive
rice, as high as possible to shield weak and
uncompetitive domestic farmers from a flood of
cheaper imports. Japan is also seeking a greater
percentage of farm products exempted from sharp
tariff reductions than many countries demand. The
US insists wants to limit that percentage to only
1%, while the Group of 10 (G-10) farm-exporting
countries, including Japan, South Korea and
Switzerland, are demanding exemptions of 10-15%.
While digging in its heels to protect some
farm products, Japan has begun to try a new tactic
to breathe life into its ailing agricultural
sector: plying foreign consumers with its own
foods. "Japan should export safe and tasty food
rather than just importing. Let's change our
defensive attitude in farming to a more positive
one and spread the Japanese diet to the world,"
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said in Tokyo on
Saturday at a government-sponsored annual food
fair. He said high-quality Japanese exports of
beef, apples, strawberries and rice are popular
with "foodies" around the world.
Cashing in on Japanese cuisine A
major reason for hope in the farm-export drive is
the popularity of Japanese cuisine, which is
widely perceived as healthy as well as exotic. To
some extent, this popularity was driven by the
expansion of Japanese businesses abroad, which
multiplied the number of Japanese restaurants
overseas. For many years, these establishments
were largely the preserve of local Japanese
expatriates. However, many such restaurants have
had to reach beyond their traditional clientele in
recent years as Japanese companies slimmed down
their overseas operations after the bursting of
the "bubble economy"; when they did so, it further
boosted the popularity of Japanese food.
Ironically, though, Japanese consumers now
eat less rice and other domestically grown farm
produce. Their diet has shifted from traditional
vegetable-based Japanese cuisine, or washoku,
to bread, pasta and other Western dishes.
Alarmed by recent studies finding that the
Westernized diet, junk food and a lack of exercise
have produced many obese children, the government
has launched projects aimed at raising public
awareness of healthy diet, including the food fair
attended by Koizumi.
Japan, the world's
largest net food importer, has set a new,
ambitious goal of doubling exports of agricultural
and marine products over a five-year period by
2009. In 2004, the latest year for which precise
figures are available, Japan exported agricultural
and marine products worth about 300 billion yen
(US$2.6 billion), only about 3% of the nation's
total output of such products. This amount was
dwarfed by Japan's annual imports of agricultural
and marine products, worth about 7 trillion yen.
The Japanese government aims to double exports to
600 billion yen in 2009. Among the most promising
products are apples, pears, salmon and scallops.
To meet the goal of doubling exports, the
Koizumi government earmarked 1.253 billion yen for
its fiscal 2006 budget plan to help whet
agricultural exports. This amount was nearly
double the 656 million yen in the current, fiscal
2005 budget. The government will use the increased
budget to, for example, conduct market research
and launch publicity and sales promotion
campaigns.
Regional groups of producers
have been popping up around the country to promote
exports of agricultural and marine products in
recent years. In Kumamoto prefecture, on the
westernmost main Japanese island of Kyushu, for
example, about 30 local producers of vegetables,
fruits and processed foods formed the Kumamoto
Study Group to Promote Exports of Farm, Forest and
Fishery Products in May 2004.
Japanese
food exports, especially marine products and
fruit, are on the rise. Marine products accounted
for just over 40% of the nation's total exports of
agricultural and marine products in 2004. The
export growth in marine products has been led by
salmon, which skyrocketed nearly 13-fold from 2000
to 2004, totaling 8.9 billion yen. Scallops soared
84% during the same four-year period, to 6.2
billion yen. Among other fruits, apples surged
482% from 2000 to 2.9 billion yen in 2004. During
the same four-year period, pears rose 77% to 700
million yen, oranges increased 105% to 500 million
yen, and Japanese green tea climbed 146% to 1.7
billion yen.
By region, food exports to
the rest of East Asia have shown particularly
robust increases in recent years. As the Japanese
population began to decline in 2005, two years
earlier than widely expected, Japanese farmers and
food businesses are increasingly looking to
overseas markets, especially in East Asia, where
the middle-class population that can afford
Japanese agricultural products is becoming more
numerous. In 2004, more than three-quarters of
Japanese agricultural and marine products shipped
abroad went to East Asia. China and Hong Kong
imported a combined 37% of the overall Japanese
exports of such products; South Korea 16%; and
Taiwan 13%. China's share has shown a particularly
remarkable surge in recent years, rising from a
minuscule 2% in 1989 to 17% in 2004, while Hong
Kong's has remained flat during the same period,
at 20%.
Officials at the Ministry of
Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries say it hopes
to expand overseas markets for Japanese
agricultural and marine products by taking
advantage of the current global boom in Japanese
foods and making them, including agricultural and
marine products, as a whole recognized as "a
Japanese brand rooted in Japanese technology and
culture".
Farm piracy: A 'growing'
problem Rampant piracy of Japanese
products, including animation, movies, music
compact discs, and electronic devices, has long
been a major concern for Japanese businesses and
government policymakers. But agricultural products
are not usually thought of as targets for
intellectual-property thieves. Sadly, however, the
illicit cultivation and sale of Japanese produce
varieties has become a serious problem.
As
part of efforts to maintain the competitiveness of
Japanese producers of some prized agricultural
products, the Japanese government is preparing to
launch countermeasures against illegally grown
Japanese farm produce in Asian neighbors,
beginning on April 1. The government will help
Asian neighbors establish systems for protecting
new varieties of Japanese farm produce through
seminars, regular meetings and the dispatch of
Japanese experts.
A Japanese registration
scheme, under the Seeds and Seedlings Law,
protects the rights of individuals and
organizations that have cultivated a new type of
farm produce by prohibiting the sale or import of
the new strain from another country without the
registrant's permission. But at present there is
no way of cracking down on sales of pirated
Japanese agricultural and marine products on
overseas markets. Unlike industrial products,
agricultural ones are not yet fully protected
under international intellectual property
treaties, and this has opened the way for
large-scale purloining of valuable varieties. For
example, the bulk of South Korean strawberries are
said to be Japanese varieties.
Pirated
Japanese farm products began to hit the domestic
market in large quantities several years ago.
Among them are Yukitebo, a new variety of kidney
beans developed in Tokachi on the northernmost
main Japanese island of Hokkaido; and Tochiotome,
a strawberry variety developed in Tochigi
prefecture, just north of Tokyo. Yukitebo and
Tochiotome were grown in China and South Korea
without permission, and reimported into the
Japanese markets.
According to a survey
conducted in 2002 by the Society for
Techno-innovation of Agriculture, Forestry and
Fisheries, 30% of farmers and farming firms who
had registered a new seed variety said they had
fallen victim to piracy. Alarmed by the growing
amount of pirated farm produce sold on the
domestic market, the government revised the Seeds
and Seedlings law in 2003 to toughen the penalties
for seed piracy, as well as making it possible to
stop pirated products from entering the country at
customs. Furthermore, in view of the increasingly
rampant piracy of Japanese agricultural products
abroad, the government's Intellectual Property
Strategy Headquarters also decided last June to
reconsider the measures needed to stop pirated
farm products.
Still, the cat-and-mouse
game is continuing between Japanese
law-enforcement authorities and traders in pirated
Japanese farm produce. The basic problem is that
protected seeds are both easy to get (most fruits
and vegetables contain fertile seeds) and easy to
steal (preventing individuals from putting seeds
in a suitcase and taking them abroad is almost
impossible).
Last month the prefectural
government of Yamagata, in northeastern Japan,
filed a complaint against Japanese and Australian
employees of an Australian company for violation
of the Seeds and Seedlings Law. The local
government alleged that a technique to grow
Benishuho, a cherry variety, was illegally
transferred to the Australian company.
DNA
analysis has been effective in uncovering cases of
piracy. Last March, the prosecutor's office of
Kumamoto prefecture discovered through DNA
analysis that the pirated version of Hinomidori, a
type of igusa rush used for making tatami mats
that was developed by the prefectural government,
was being imported from China. The prosecutors
office indicted the Japanese importer on charges
of violating the Customs Law. But the office was
not able to determine how the technique was leaked
abroad.
The Hinomidori case took place
nearly four years after Tokyo and Beijing locked
horns over the igusa-rush trade. Japan imposed
"safeguard" import restrictions for the first time
in early 2001, albeit on a temporary basis, on
three Chinese agricultural products - stone leeks,
shiitake mushrooms and igusa rushes. This invited
an angry retaliation from China, which slapped
punitive 100% import duties on three Japanese
industrial products - automobiles, air
conditioners and mobile phones. Japan lifted the
import restrictions after the two countries agreed
on an "orderly trade" in the three farm products
in question.
The tit-for-tat trade war
between Tokyo and Beijing was resolved at the end
of 2001, shortly before China was admitted to the
WTO. The Sino-Japanese trade war was widely seen
as a victory for China and a defeat for Japan,
where concerns grew, especially among non-farm
industries, about losing business opportunities in
the rapidly growing and lucrative Chinese market
of about 1.3 billion people if the trade war
dragged on. Growing Chinese farm piracy not only
has raised fresh concerns in Japan about
intellectual-property protection, but is also -
literally and figuratively - sowing the seeds of
further trade conflict between the two Asian
giants.
Hisane Masaki is a
Tokyo-based journalist, commentator and scholar on
international politics and economics. Masaki's
e-mail address isyiu45535@nifty.com.
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