Colby Cosh: Japan has an excuse for supply management. Where's ours?
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As far as I can make out, it's the latter. Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.
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If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you're capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada's, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.
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It's a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.
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The government depends on the cooperatives to get the additional Japanese rice to the market, and they're taking their sweet time. The emergency imports are coming from South Korea, and, as you might expect, there's some culinary prejudice against the nasty foreign stuff.
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The obvious answer to these perpetual headaches is market liberalization and free trade — but the 'strategic' argument for rice supply management in Japan really does have force. News flash: the Japanese live on an archipelago, in Asia, next door to China and a stone's throw from North Korea. Blockades and bombardments justifiably loom large in their imagination. Japan is a highly homogenous national collective. It will probably take a real long time for them to shake the thought that they can survive anything, outlast any enemy and endure any tribulation, as long as they're able to keep growing their own rice.
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