The Politics of Agriculture in Japan
The Politics of Agriculture in Japan

Author: Aurelia George Mulgan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 880

ISBN-13: 1134594402

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Agriculture is one of the most politically powerful sectors in Japanese national politics. This book provides the first comprehensive account of the political power of Japanese farmers. This definitive text analyses the organisational and electoral bais of farmers' political power, including the role of agricultural interest groups, the mobilisation of the farm vote and links between farmers and politicians in the Diet. Agrarian power has helped to produce the distinctly pro-rural, anti-urban bias of postwar Japanese governments, resulting in a general neglect of urban consumer interests and sustained opposition to market opening for farm products. This book represents a major study of Japanese agricultural organisations in their multifarious roles as interest groups, agents of agricultural administration, electoral resource providers and mammouth business groups. It describes the policy issues that engage farmers' concerns and identifies the agricultural commodities that carry the greatest political significance.

Betting on the Farm
Betting on the Farm

Author: Patricia L. Maclachlan

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1501762141

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA), a nationwide network of farm cooperatives, is under increasing pressure to expand farmer incomes by adapting coop strategies to changing market incentives. Some coops have adapted more successfully than others. In Betting on the Farm, Patricia L. Maclachlan and Kay Shimizu attribute these differences to three sets of local variables: resource endowments and product-specific market conditions, coop leadership, and the organization of farmer-members behind new coop strategies. Using in-depth case studies and profiles of different types of farmers, Betting on the Farm also explores the evolution of the formal and informal institutional foundations of postwar agriculture; the electoral sources of JA's influence; the interactive effects of economic liberalization and demographic pressures (an aging farm population and acute shortage of farm successors) on the propensity for change within the farm sector; and the diversification of Japan's traditional farm households and the implications for farmer ties with JA.

Agriculture and Economic Development in East Asia
Agriculture and Economic Development in East Asia

Author: Joanna Boestel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1134682751

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A comparative study which describes and analyses the contribution of agriculture to the economies of East Asia. Until now, little attention has been paid to the agricultural sector which actually underpins industrial and commercial development. Recently, this sector has become the focus of increasingly bitter economic disputes, especially over protection and the use of import tariffs. A comparative framework is used, employing case studies from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea to highlight both the common characteristics of agriculture's role in East Asian development, and features particular to the political economy of agriculture in each country.

Japan’s Agro-Food Sector
Japan’s Agro-Food Sector

Author: Albrecht Rothacher

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1989-06-18

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1349103039

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book describes the profound structural change in Japan's agriculture from its politically marginalized, economically fragmented, traditional labour-intensive postwar mode of production to its current dual modern shape of a highly capitalized, politically organized and protected sector.

Food Politics
Food Politics

Author: Robert Paarlberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-04-07

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0199746052

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The politics of food is changing fast. In rich countries, obesity is now a more serious problem than hunger. Consumers once satisfied with cheap and convenient food now want food that is also safe, nutritious, fresh, and grown by local farmers using fewer chemicals. Heavily subsidized and underregulated commercial farmers are facing stronger push back from environmentalists and consumer activists, and food companies are under the microscope. Meanwhile, agricultural success in Asia has spurred income growth and dietary enrichment, but agricultural failure in Africa has left one-third of all citizens undernourished - and the international markets that link these diverse regions together are subject to sudden disruption. Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know? carefully examines and explains the most important issues on today's global food landscape, including international food prices, famines, chronic hunger, the Malthusian race between food production and population growth, international food aid, "green revolution" farming, obesity, farm subsidies and trade, agriculture and the environment, agribusiness, supermarkets, food safety, fast food, slow food, organic food, local food, and genetically engineered food. Politics in each of these areas has become polarized over the past decade by conflicting claims and accusations from advocates on all sides. Paarlberg's book maps this contested terrain, challenging myths and critiquing more than a few of today's fashionable beliefs about farming and food. For those ready to have their thinking about food politics informed and also challenged, this is the book to read. What Everyone Needs to Know? is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism
The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism

Author: Sidney Xu Lu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1108482422

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.

Ideas about Agriculture in the Political Economy of Japan
Ideas about Agriculture in the Political Economy of Japan

Author: James M. Brady

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-02-01

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1527565378

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A major paradox in the political economy of Japan is why an enduring majority of citizens, as voters, consumers, and taxpayers, has explicitly supported or implicitly consented to a policy regime of agricultural protection that reduces material welfare and limits consumer choice. This book goes beyond standard political economy approaches that focus on self-interest pursuit by policy actors to contend that ideational factors are an important explanatory variable shaping the policy preferences of individuals towards agriculture and agricultural policy in Japan. The book traces the historical origins of ideas about agriculture, particularly those associated with the nōhonshugi tradition, and offers an original taxonomy classifying the development of agrarian thought from the Tokugawa era until the 1930s. It then analyses postwar media portrayals of agriculture in public policy debates around the 1961 and 1999 agricultural ‘basic laws’, charting the evolution of both economic and non-economic ideas in those periods. Finally, it investigates the predominant ideas held about agriculture by individuals today, as evidenced through public opinion survey data, and demonstrates that concerns about health and food safety, food self-sufficiency, and the environment strongly outweigh economic welfare considerations. The study concludes by examining developments in agricultural policy under the Abe administration in the context of these predominant ideas, and considers how those ideas could be operationalised in agricultural policy responses to major crises including the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

Development for Sustainable Agriculture
Development for Sustainable Agriculture

Author: Akio Hosono

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-26

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1137431350

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the mid-1970s, the tropical savanna, known as Cerrado, has been transformed into one of the world's largest grain-growing regions. This book explores how and by what Brazil achieved inclusive and sustainable growth in the Cerrado.

Japan's Agricultural Policy Regime
Japan's Agricultural Policy Regime

Author: Aurelia George Mulgan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1134211864

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Written by the world’s leading expert in the field, this book examines the evolution of Japanese agricultural policy in the post-war period, focusing particularly from the 1970s onwards when both domestic and external pressures for reform began to intensify. The author explains how the MAFF has safeguarded their institutional capacity to intervene by accommodating both public interest in agricultural policy reform alongside the interests of government in maintaining agricultural support and protection. The book provides a major reinterpretation of agricultural policy, examining how the MAFF’s role as an ‘intervention maximiser’ has been redefined in the face of continued bureaucratic involvement. Making available in English for the first time Japanese policy changes in the post-war period, the book will appeal to political economy specialists and political scientists, and those with an interest in Japanese politics and bureaucratic institutions.