Peak Food and Japan Part 5 – Consequences for Japan

Rising concerns

The World Food Program have declared that the food crisis is a “silent tsunami” sweeping the world which, like a large natural disaster, requires a global response. Tsunami is a Japanese word meaning harbour wave. Could this disaster-prone country be seriously affected by the crisis?

In a recent survey, over 40% of people in Japan viewed rising food prices as a concern. As Kyodo News reports:

(This) represented three-fold increases from a survey in January 2007 and marked record highs since this question was first asked in 1998…

It would appear that they are right to be worried. The price rises are hitting the poor in Japan hard. For widow-headed households, average expenditure is now higher than income. Is the recent rationing of rice in the United States and the United Kingdom just the tip of the iceberg for developed countries?

In Part 4 I looked at global agriculture, but in this post I will cover the likely consequences of peak food for Japan.

Japan’s trade surplus is crashing

Japan has an trade dependent economy, based on the importation of raw materials and the exportation of finished products. Over the decades, Japan has nurtured a large trade surplus which has led to the accumulation of massive foreign currency reserves.

In the year 2000, Tony Boys said in “Food and Energy in Japan” that if food and oil prices rise:

Japan’s trade surplus could be wiped out remarkably quickly. The inability to import needed quantities of essential goods could see Japan caught in an unstoppable downward recessional spiral.

There are signs that this decline is beginning to occur; the economy is at serious risk due to increasing raw material prices, which show no signs of abating. MarketWatch have reported that:

Exports grew a slower-than-expected 2.3% in March from a year earlier, down from February’s 8.7% expansion. Imports were up 11.1% on year, driven in part by soaring crude-oil prices which lifted the petroleum import bill by 51.6%, leading a 30.2% reduction in Japan’s trade surplus.

30.2% is a massive drop, especially considering that the oil and food prices have continued to rise since March. Are we seeing Japan’s trade surplus being “wiped out”, as Boys predicted?

Dependency on oil imports

Japan consumes 5,578,000 barrels of oil a day, the world’s third highest rate after the US and China. However, domestic production is tiny, and so net exports over imports are the second highest in the world. Japan is also heavily dependent on other forms of imported energy, such as kerosene.

The country has a need to become a leader in exports that are valuable in a post-peak oil world. At the moment they are surviving because of the appetite for new cars in Asia.

In the future it is likely that food exporters will trade with energy exporters in order to survive. Japan is neither.

The food crisis begins to bite

In Part 3, I explained how the changes that the Japanese have made to their agriculture and diet are responsible for their high fossil fuel dependence.

Though a few commentators have been warning about a looming grain crisis in Japan for a number of years, it is only in the last few months that people have really sat up and took any notice. The Times reported in March that, despite its wealth, Japan is now beginning to lose out in bidding wars for food:

Deals are being blown, a senior executive at one of Japan’s largest trading houses said, because corporate Japan is not financially prepared for the ferocity of price competition with China and not culturally nimble enough to outbid its rivals.

In another recent article, the paper warned of the implications to the Japanese diet:

Japan, its leading food importers say, will inevitably take a step backwards in the food it eats. “The time will come,” says Akio Shibata, the director of the Marubeni Institute and one of Japan’s foremost experts on food supply, “when the Japanese people will realise that they will not have the quality, taste and prices of food they are used to.”

In 2000, Boys foretold this situation:

There will almost certainly not be the fuel available for mass transportation of food, the maintenance of the cold chain, supermarkets, restaurants, and so on… It will be very hard for many people to make large and sudden changes in diet…

Gradual change to a more appropriate Japanese diet would be a good first step towards attaining self-sufficiency in food…

This gradual change is necessary to give the agricultural industry time to recover, and also to allow the population to naturally decline to a sustainable level. This is what is termed as a soft-landing approach to a post-peak oil world.

Governmental action

In 2000, Boys paid passing comment to hopes that the politicians were in secret making the necessary changes to Japanese agriculture which would allow such a soft-landing approach.

It is now eight years later and it is interesting to see if there has been any signs of this. In fact, Japanese food self-sufficiency has dipped slightly from 40% to 39% and plans to increase this figure have been delayed.

Seemingly in self-denial about the current sustainability of the nation’s diet, the government is giving support to farmers to supply more of their products to processed food manufacturers. This year they are also increasing their foreign aid to food exporting countries, in order to guarantee production and deals:

(Japan) will use its foreign aid to diversify the countries from which it buys grains and oilseeds, Masatoshi Wakabayashi, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, said.

Producers in Southeast Asia and South America may receive financial or technological assistance to expand grain output, Wakabayashi said in an interview Monday in Tokyo. Japan is also considering aid for trading infrastructure, such as storage and port facilities, he said.

This might be beneficial, depending on whether the agricultural schemes supported abroad are sustainable or not.

In another move, it was reported by Bloomberg last week that, due to the increasing price of Japan’s imports, the government are going to ask the World Trade Organisation to stop food exporting countries from restricting their exports. They think that there should be balanced rules for food exporters and importers, and this perhaps shows their increasing fear regarding Japan’s food supply:

“Until now Japan could rely on purchasing food from anywhere in the world because consumers can afford to pay,” Yasuhiko Nakamura, head of the government’s food education council, said last week. “In the future, it may be impossible to import even if we have money.”

However, these moves to keep the importation supplies going are stop-gap measures at best, ignoring the looming transportation crunch as shipping becomes more expensive. Local agriculture simply must be increased in order to cope with oil price rises. Poorer countries such as Tanzania have been suffering because the transport costs have risen so high that food cannot even be driven from where it is produced to where it is sold, let alone shipped across the world.

MAFF’s plans for farmers

Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) have a website which gives an idea about their plans for protecting Japanese agriculture from high oil prices:

MAFF is going to implement measures to promote the fast improvement of equipment and machines to support the introduction and widespread use of energy-saving agricultural machines…

MAFF supports programs of research and development, technology demonstration, awareness for new ideas about reusable fuel. One of the aims of the programs is to make use of biomass that has not been previously used like paddy straw and thinned-wood since they do not compete with food.

Whilst a move to more energy efficient machinery would be useful in the short-term, it is likely that the costs of maintaining and running it, and thus the costs of food production, will increase in line with the price of oil. To combat fuel shortages MAFF hope to create biofuel, but the nutrients in the material used for this process might be vital to boosting natural productivity in the soil.

MAFF have a New Farmland Policy to address the problem of abandoned farmland, but say that:

Under the condition that the conversion of farmlands for other purposes may be unavoidable to some extent, and the expansion of farmlands is not realistic, the importance of reserving and securing the existing superior farmlands is becoming greater.

So they hold no hope for actually increasing farmland, and simply aim to limit the reduction of the best land. They also say that:

To make domestic agriculture cost-effective through expanding operation size, it is inevitable that scattered small-size farmlands with many ownerships should be gathered into bigger collected lands under fewer managements.

In other words, a move away from the small sustainable farming of the past. These plans do not suggest that, despite Boys’ hope, the government has fully considered the implications of a drop in oil availability on food production, including the needed increase in farmers.

Other responses

Meanwhile, there seems to be a slight shift towards more inventive uses of rice, caused by the recent increase in the price of imported wheat. Rice bread and waffles, or “moffles” have made appearances on television and in newspaper articles.

There has also been a growth in local farmers’ markets, reducing the distance food is transported. This is called “chisan chisho” (produce and consume locally) activism. One example is in Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture, where their efforts are being hurt by the government planning to build a food waste recycling biogas plant nearby. The farmers fear that this will create a lot of traffic and smell, damaging their market’s appeal.

It seems that these two groups should be working together, not fighting over location. The waste for the plant will be brought in from far around, requiring a lot of infrastructure and fuel. The solution might be smaller, locally based biogas plants.

Organic farming

The country has long been associated with organic farming. Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, originated in Japan in the form of teikei. The Japan Organic Agriculture Association mentioned in Part 3 is part of this organic growing movement in Japan.

Farmers such as Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer of “no-till farming” and author of The One-Straw Revolution, are well-known in permaculture circles.

Other institutions such as the Permaculture Centre of Japan, and Daiwa JFS sustainability college, are leaders in sustainable farming and living here.

However, what if there was a sudden drop in imports due to crises in the world food markets and oil prices? Are these colleges and projects quickly scalable in a country of 126 million people?

Food crisis manual

To prepare for the event of such a sudden drop in food imports, the government has drawn up a plan which it published as a “food crisis manual” in 2001. Andrew DeWit, associate professor of Economics at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, wrote in 2005 that:

The manual essentially advises that potatoes and other starchy tubers be grown virtually everywhere and even in place of the rice crop. Surely it would be prudent to use this ongoing crisis to save oil and build up a sustainable agriculture sector to boot.

In “Food and Energy in Japan” Boys told of the Government report on the consequences of a total cessation of imported food:

Firstly, the food energy available at 1760 kcal/cap/day is tantamount to starvation for many as the food is unlikely to be rationed out equally (and if it were that would mean slow malnutrition for many anyway). The UN recommends a minimum of 2130 kcal/cap/day on average.

Despite agreeing with the plan to plant a lot of potatoes, Boys thought that:

The JMAFF scenario still resembles North Korea in 1996 rather than Japan in the 21st century, and the fact that the Ministry would publish such a scenario shows that they understand only too well the precarious situation that Japan and her people exist under now.

Urban nightmare

Walking among the tower blocks of Tokyo, the daunting nature of the challenge Japan faces becomes clear. New skyscrapers are erected to great elation and people are stacked higher in apartment complexes. As I mentioned in Part 4, due to this ominous increase in population density, it is unlikely that the urban permaculture methods used in Cuba to survive the 1990s will work in the world’s largest built-up area.

Nevertheless, efforts will have to be made when the situation takes a turn for the worse. There are balconies, rooftops and lots cleared for decades-long road construction projects, likely never to be completed. How long before schemes such as the train station permaculture project run by Cecilia Macaulay are embraced fully in order to produce food? In the United States, suburban farming is already taking off.

No time left

The potential devastation that will be visited on Japan as food and oil prices continue to rise is unfathomable.

Will the people flock to the cities to avail themselves of government aid, furthering Japan’s rural depopulation? Or will there be a mass exodus to the countryside, with people trying to eke out a living from the land? In an article in the New Internationalist Japan in 2001, Boys gave the following advice:

Look at your current surroundings and try to see the potentials (and pitfalls) for a more self-reliant lifestyle. If you live in one of the very urbanized areas of Japan, try to think how you can relocate to the countryside if and when the time comes.

The likelihood of this being heeded seems slim while Japan continues on its current path. There are millions of people in Tokyo who have no connection to rural areas and would consider such a move to be wholly unimaginable. Most of these people, while beginning to worry about the food prices, are not aware as to the potential severity of the problem.

If the megalopolis does begin to empty then the influx of people into rural areas has the potential to overwhelm the ecosystems there. Japan’s major natural resource, its forests, will probably be cut down for fuel, building material and farmland. This will damage the soil fertility and potentially cause landslides, as occurred in North Korea in the 1990s.

The whole process will have to occur at breakneck speeds in order to bring production up to levels which would result in starvation anyway. Also, as Boys himself said in 2000:

It will be many years before the majority of people are able to do highly productive agricultural work. There may be too few with the appropriate skills and knowledge to teach them. There may not be enough fuel for machines, it may not be possible to keep the machines in good repair. There may not be enough farm animals. Much of the hard, physical work may have to be done by human labor.

Boys hoped that a change would occur prior to this situation:

Current world and national trends suggest that it would be prudent for Japan to effect a series of key policy changes in the very near future if she wishes to prevent mass starvation and ecological devastation in the first half of the 21st century.

However, as seen, the rate of change since he wrote that has been too slow. There looks to be little likelihood of a soft-landing approach, or any reason to hope that the remaining fossil fuels will be used wisely for the transition.

As imported food becomes too expensive, people will be forced to turn to local produce which is no longer available. Crisis management, as planned by the government, will lead to mass starvation.

Food wars?

Food is the essence of life and somewhere along the lines our civilization has forgotten this. When Japan finds that its money will no longer keep its people fed, what then? Finding a country locally that can spare any food will be very difficult.

Will Japan let its people starve, and then cope with the social unrest that will inevitably follow? Or will it secure the needed resources in other ways?

The frightening prospects of food wars and in-country refugee crises loom over the horizon of Japan’s near future. For a country which is the world’s largest net importer of food, this is an urgent concern that I feel is not being seriously addressed by commentators. They are bewitched, as are most of the developed world, by the impossible dream of constant growth, based on the exploitation of a finite resource.

One of The Times articles mentioned above includes the reassurance that:

Wealthy Japan faces low risk of starvation, food rioting or any of the associated social unrest which threaten much of the developing world. Japan’s people can absorb food price rises for the time being.

What happens after “the time being”?

In Part 6 I will make some concluding thoughts.