Japanese economy has been heavily involved in the international economy since the 1960's, but the impact to the world economy has become dramatically big since the 1970's. The difference is thus: in the 1960's, Japanese economy made itself involve in willingly but was forced to be open to the world exporters unwillingly. In the 1970's and 1980's, the main industries leading Japanese economy have willingly rushed, entered to the world economy and exported lots of products, while they made Japanese market more open to the exporters of the Western countries, not only in terms of volume of import but also item numbers of free import.
Under these circumstances, Japanese agriculture, which looks much less competitive, is facing the big difficulty, whether it can survive or fade out through competition with imported ones.
If the adequate policies would not be adopted, I am convinced that Japanese agriculture will gradually lose its position. In order to let Japanese agriculture survive, the following targets and points should be introduced into the agricultural policies.
1) Japanese Government should declare clearly its necessity of food self-sufficiency and specify the tolerable lowest rate of food self-sufficiency, acquiring consensus and support of Japanese people. The policy includes specification of the necessary level of total farmland acreage and labor forces, so that it can maintain food self-sufficiency.
2) Government is expected to declare which items of farm products markets should never be open to import, and set the time schedule when the non-strategic items will make their markets open.
3) The region-oriented policy should be introduced to the present agricultural policy which has been effective equally throughout Japan, just like the rice price support and set aside programs.
4) “Reconstruction of farm structure” policy should be focused, not on the farm family units, but on the fulltime farmer units.
