大会講演
Financialization of the Food System: Contextualization in Japan and Developing a Research Agenda
2026 年 62 巻 1 号 p. 31-36
詳細
2026 年 62 巻 1 号 p. 31-36
The 2025 ARAFE International Symposium, held on November 2, 2025, at Shimane University and online via Zoom Webinar, commenced with a welcome address by Kazuki Taketoshi, President of ARAFE. Taketoshi emphasized the timeliness of the symposium’s theme, noting that Japan’s 2024 re-opening of rice futures markets and the subsequent 2025 rice price crisis had brought questions of financialization into sharp public focus. He expressed hope that the symposium would contribute to both academic understanding and practical policy responses. In my opening remarks as chair, I situated the symposium within a broader historical arc, observing that Japan pioneered one of the world’s first formalized agricultural futures markets with the Dojima Rice Exchange in eighteenth-century Osaka. Yet despite this deep history, contemporary financialization in Japan’s food sector has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. The symposium aimed to address this gap by bringing together international and Japanese scholars to critically engage with the evolving landscape of food system financialization. Nina Takashino (Ritsumeikan University), Keeni Minakshi (Tohoku University), and Motoi Kusadokoro (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology) served as moderators throughout the proceedings.
The financialization of food systems has become a defining force reshaping global agricultural production, distribution, and consumption. Beyond the broad notion of financial actors gaining influence in commodity markets, food system financialization refers to the transformation of food into a financial asset, where speculation, rent-seeking, and financial engineering shape prices, market structures, and food security outcomes. This process manifests in several ways: speculative trading in agricultural futures and derivatives, the increasing role of institutional investors and private equity in farmland and agribusiness, and the financial restructuring of major commodity traders.
The consequences of food financialization are far-reaching. They include heightened price volatility, opaque supply chain governance, market concentration in the hands of a few multinational traders, and growing dis-connections between producers and consumers. These dynamics exacerbate food insecurity, marginalize small-scale farmers, and shift the priorities of food systems away from public goods and sustainability toward financial returns. While these issues have been extensively studied in North American and European contexts, their manifestations and impacts in Japan remain underexplored.
This symposium brought together three international and Japanese scholars to address key themes including speculation and price volatility, market concentration and corporate power, financialization of land and production, and regulation, policy, and alternative models. By situating Japan within global debates on food financialization, the symposium aimed to advance theoretical frameworks, generate new empirical insights, and foster dialogue on policy alternatives.
Three presentations were delivered: Philip Howard (Michigan State University), Loka Ashwood (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Kiyotaka Maeda (Keio University), followed by comments from Midori Hiraga (Kyoto Tachibana University) and Kohei Yagi (Kobe University). The papers associated with these presentations are listed in the bibliography.
(P1) Presentation by Philip HowardHoward presented on price-fixing by dominant meat processors and the global concentration of agrifood power. He demonstrated that in the United States, prices for chicken, pork, and beef have increased rapidly even as prices paid to livestock producers have decreased, resulting in record profits for the world’s largest meat processors. A key contributor to this trend was Agri Stats, Inc., a firm that coordinated the sharing of competitively sensitive data between meat processors—ostensibly anonymously, but in practice allowing easy identification of firms and specific facilities. This enabled participating firms to coordinate decisions achieving lower pro-duction levels, higher retail prices, and lower wages for processing plant workers. Hundreds of lawsuits have resulted in over one billion US dollars in fines and settlements.
Howard introduced the concept of common ownership, where investment firms such as Vanguard and BlackRock hold large ownership stakes across the industry’s largest firms, potentially increasing incentives for anti-competitive behaviors. He also discussed “gin rummy” transactions—the swapping of divisions among largest firms to obtain greater market power. In the US, just four firms control over 70% of beef processing, more than two-thirds of pork processing, and more than half of chicken processing. The largest firms, JBS and Tyson, are dominant across all three categories.
Howard employed various visualization methods including treemaps, network charts, waffle charts, spatial concentration maps, and timelines. He noted that the conventional CR4 metric (where four firms controlling more than 40% of a sector indicates concentration) faces significant problems: concentration depends on how sectors are defined, vertical integration creates complexity that is hard to quantify, and national jurisdictions limit regulatory reach. Regarding countermeasures, Howard advocated avoiding the simple concept of “scaling up” in favor of horizontal proliferation, autonomy, decentralization, cooperation and solidarity, transparency, and diversity at multiple scales. He noted that slow processing methods that present barriers to being acquired by large firms, such as stone mills, and logos signifying non-corporate ownership (e.g., Independent Craft Beer label, Real Bread) represent potential resistance strategies.
(P2) Presentation by Loka AshwoodAshwood examined the backstage and frontstage of public firms in the global agrochemical complex, drawing on Goffman’s (1956) dramaturgical perspective. She argued that while publicly traded firms serve as the visible “frontstage” of corporate power, the real action occurs backstage in proliferating private entities—Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), Limited Partnerships (LPs), and various corporate forms across jurisdictions. Firms increasingly do not need to be public to access equity, and the number of private companies has grown significantly worldwide. This opacity and complexity makes it difficult to assign responsibility for environmental and social harms.
Using social network analysis with data from Sayari Graph, Bloomberg Finance L.P., and LexisNexis, Ashwood mapped the complex relationships among nine publicly traded agrochemical giants: BASF, Bayer, Corteva, Dow, DuPont de Nemours Inc., FMC, COFCO, ChemChina, and UPL. She found an entangled network of seventeen firms acting as nests for publicly traded companies, with individual public firms not moored to single nations. Rather, nationalism appears performative through the public firm, while backstage, entities across nations interact through lesser-known subsidiaries, aliases, and global networks of people including shareholders, beneficial owners, directors, and board members.
Ashwood illustrated how LLC proliferation narrows liability for specific activities, using the hog industry as an example. Land owners and farmers are often most exposed when things go wrong, while the spiderweb of LLCs remains protected. She presented data showing devastating consequences of consolidation over time: 88% loss of hog farmers, 90% loss of dairy farmers, with only fruits, nuts, and some vegetables showing gains or smaller losses. This consolidation, she argued, has contributed to a loss of trust in government, as rural communities perceive government as facilitating corporate displacement.
(P3) Presentation by Kiyotaka MaedaMaeda examined rice as financialized food in the Japanese Empire during the interwar period. He noted that Japan’s long history of rice futures trading began in the eighteenth century, with the Tokugawa Shogunate authorizing the Dojima Rice Exchange in Osaka in 1730. Rice futures trading flourished from the 1870s to the 1930s, setting index prices for spot markets. However, the government introduced food control systems in the 1930s that eventually suspended rice trading in 1939.
Maeda analyzed the role of deferred contracts, which allowed rice to be traded without physical delivery. He examined tensions between the domestic government (favoring rice protection) and colonial governments in Taiwan and Korea (seeking to produce and trade into the center). The development of colonial rice trade successfully displaced foreign im-ports from Southeast Asia. Some urban areas like Tokyo consumed a majority of colonial rice by the 1920s and 1930s, with seasonal patterns playing a key role: domestic rice was widely available by winter after harvest, but colonial rice—particularly Horai (Japonica) rice developed for Taiwan’s subtropical cli-mate—dominated by July each year.
Maeda presented an econometric analysis of price linkages between metropolitan and colonial exchanges, finding that futures prices often ended up determining final prices. Kumamoto’s local exchange, dealing primarily with domestic rice, essentially followed prices set by futures markets in Osaka and Tokyo. He noted that Japan did crack down after domestic farmers complained about fluctuations caused by colonial rice imports in 1925, demonstrating the possibility of intervention. However, this lesson may not have been learned well as, one hundred years later, rice futures markets were opened again 2024, setting the stage for the dramatic rice price swings of early 2025.
Hiraga, drawing on her research on the political economy of vegetable oils and soy in Japan’s industrial mass diet, raised fundamental questions about identifying “capitalists” in today’s capitalist food system. She noted that Japanese scholars and activists still employ a “capitalists versus laborers” dichotomy, but identifying actual power holders has become increasingly difficult. When examining shareholders of Japanese agribusiness and sogo-shosha (general trading companies), she found that custody banks—such as The Master Trust Bank of Japan and Custody Bank of Japan—are listed as major shareholders. However, these institutions only perform asset administration; they do not make investment decisions. The actual decision-makers remain obscured behind layers of mutual funds, pension funds, and investment vehicles.
Hiraga asked Howard directly: with common ownership increasing, who actually holds power and how do they control our food system? How are asset management firms actually impacting agri-food business? She also inquired about the presence of Japanese companies in global agri-food concentration, noting names like Sakata and Takii in seeds, Kubota in machinery, and Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo in the protein industry. To Ashwood, she observed that while the LLC structure is terrible for local communities and environments—as damages are externalized while nobody takes responsibility—farmers cannot be blamed for joining these structures, as they offer reduced working hours, lower risks and debts, and protection for investments and livelihoods. The structural question, then, is how to tackle this problem when in-dividual rational choices aggregate into collective harm.
(C2) Comments by Kohei YagiYagi provided Japanese context using in-put-output analysis. He presented data showing that from 2005 to 2015, the food and beverage industry’s share of value added from food consumption increased from 42.7% to 46.4%, while the agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sector’s share declined from 18.6% to 14.9%. This suggests value extraction moving further away from primary producers. He also noted that the number of food manufacturing establishments decreased by approximately 17% over the same period (from 34,196 to 28,239 establishments with four or more employees), implying consolidation.
Yagi questioned Howard and Ashwood about the feasibility of revitalizing national antitrust enforcement against food industry oligopolization, and whether emerging economy firms entering global food markets might weaken concentration. He also asked how American citizens perceive their findings and what actions they are taking. He emphasized the importance of alternative food systems—local production for local consumption (chisan-chisho), farmers’ markets, and civic movement-based agricultural sales—that resist absorption by large capital. For Maeda, Yagi raised methodological questions about the positive coefficient on Korean rice imports in his regression analysis, noting this seemed theoretically inconsistent with standard supply-demand relationships.
Responding to questions about using network power to tackle antitrust authorities, Howard affirmed that interpersonal ties and inter- and intra-firm relations do matter. However, old-fashioned antitrust laws cannot capture these relationships well. Network methods offer a better approach to measuring competition, but regulators remain unconvinced. Regarding Japanese companies in global concentration, Howard acknowledged their presence in seeds, machinery, and protein industries but noted that the same structural dynamics apply globally.
(R2) Reply from Loka AshwoodAshwood acknowledged that LLCs are notoriously difficult to pierce. Some data literally comes from asking local residents about who they have encountered, as there is often no public way to access ownership information. When owners have been revealed, responsibility has almost always been held by large corporations operating indirectly through subsidiary layers. She suggested looking at private firms “upside-down”—starting with individual names of people within the spider-web rather than the corporate structures themselves.
When asked whether corporations might intentionally sow distrust locally to position themselves as neutral actors, Ashwood responded that it is becoming clear that corporations are also failing to deliver on their promises. She emphasized that rural people across nations essentially share the same enemies, as these are global corporate structures. If researchers can pierce the corporate veil, they can identify who to target and eventually hold public firms accountable.
(R3) Reply from Kiyotaka MaedaMaeda addressed the seemingly counter-intuitive regression coefficient by explaining that the government did intervene in ex-changes, so futures prices should not be considered the only or primary driver of prices. Government control laws from 1925 help explain why futures prices were synchronized with spot prices. He noted that much about the functioning of futures markets remains a “black box” that has fluctuated over time. Merchants eligible to be rice dealers submitted resumes and backgrounds, providing potential data for analyzing who controlled the market.
Regarding farmer political power, Maeda noted that many politicians in the dominant Constitutional Party during the interwar period were farmers and landowners, giving them influence when colonial rice imports caused disruption. However, it remains unclear whether their advocacy benefited smaller peasants or primarily served larger landholding interests. The policy conflicts between domestic farmers, the central government, and colonial governments reveal the political economy of financialization even a century ago.
In closing remarks, Vice President Keshav Lall Maharjan thanked the participants and noted the significance of the discussions for ongoing ARAFE research on sustainable food systems.
What emerged most strikingly from this symposium was the depth of opacity characterizing contemporary food system financialization—and the creative methodological responses that a new generation of scholars is developing to penetrate this obscurity. The three presentations demonstrated remarkable complementarity in this regard. Maeda’s historical analysis revealed why obscurity may have been incentivized from the beginning: the interwar rice futures markets show how deferred contracts and exchange mechanisms created distance between prices and physical commodities, while colonial trade relationships added layers of political complexity that benefited some actors by remaining opaque to others.
Howard’s investigative approach—combining traditional documentary research with sophisticated visualization techniques—demonstrates that patient, systematic work can still map corporate concentration and expose coordinating mechanisms like Agri Stats. His treemaps, network charts, and concentration metrics provide tools for making visible what corporations prefer to keep hidden. Ashwood’s big data approach, using social network analysis to trace relationships among publicly traded firms and their private subsidiaries, offers another pathway into the corporate “backstage.” Her dramaturgical framing—distinguishing the performative frontstage of public corporations from the complex network of private entities operating behind them—provides conceptual tools for understanding how accountability is systematically evaded.
These approaches suggest that Japanese agricultural economists need more young scholars willing to engage with financialization’s complexity. The questions raised by Hiraga about custody banks and the difficulty of identifying actual decision-makers, and by Yagi about value extraction along food chains, indicate rich research agendas awaiting investigation in the Japanese context.
This symposium also invites us to rethink what “ownership” means in an era of financialization. The emotive dimension matters: who do people believe owns food system infrastructure, and what sense of responsibility do beneficial owners feel toward the sprawling empires they nominally control through pension funds and index investments? The regulatory dimension is equally critical: if corporate structures are designed to evade national jurisdictions and fragment liability across multiple entities, how should regulation and antitrust enforcement be reconceived? These questions extend beyond academic interest. Japan’s 2024 re-opening of the rice futures market and dramatic rice price swings of 2025 demonstrate that financialization is not merely a theoretical concern but a lived reality affecting farmers, consumers, and rural communities. The scholars gathered at this symposium have begun mapping the territory; the challenge now is to develop both the analytical tools and the policy frameworks adequate to the task of democratic governance over financialized food systems.
This symposium was made possible through financial support from The Regional Association for Agriculture and Forestry Economics (ARAFE), a research grant from the Japan Association for the Promotion of Science (Project number: 21H04745), and donation from the Division of Natural Resource Economics, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University.
