日本・韓国・台湾3国の米・穀物政策発展における5段階と農業政策への含意

Abstract

In this paper the five stages in the development of rice and grain policies of Japan, Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War and the factors determining these stages are analyzed by economic and statistical methods. These five stages especially for rice policy for these three east Asian countries identified in this paper are 1. First stage of exploiting rice sector for economic development, 2. Second stage of protecting rice sector and attaining rice self-sufficiency, 3. Third stage of rice surplus, 4. Fourth stage of restoration of rice self-sufficiency, 5. Fifth stage of decaying of rice sector or maintaining rice self-sufficiency. It was found in the analysis of the factors determining these five stages in these three countries that there has been a strong tendency in rice policy to restore and maintain rice selfsufficiency and that the reasons for this tendency are (1) the fact that rice is the political goods in these countries in the sense that if rice price and supply stability were lost political disorder would result, (2) the world rice trade market is very thin, unstable and unreliable, (3) there are large externalities associated with rice production and consumption, and (4) there is huge malnurished and poor people concentrated in Asia who live on rice who will be critically affected by the rice price rise caused by rice import by these relatively rich East Asian countries. The huge grain surplus accumulated by The United States during the 60s, strong demand to liberalize agricultural trade backed by American economic, political and military hegemony after the end of Cold War and the neoclassical economic hypothesis of the benefit of free trade imposed upon the agricultural sectors of the East Asian countries by the United States, Japan, the World Bank, GATT and the WTO in the post war international trade negotiations have forced to open grain markets of Japan, Korea and Taiwan and let them import increasingly large amount of feed grains and have faced out grain sectors in these countries other than rice. I believe a country should be able to determine her policy on food that is indispensable and basic human need more independently based on the principle of sovereign right of a country. Based on these findings, on some environmental considerations and on the right and need of sovereign policy determination on food, I propose that Japan and the other East Asian countries should restore rice self-sufficiency and should increase production of other cereals with minimal input of chemical fertilizers and low and appropriate input of organic fertilizers produced from waste of human and domestic animals in the future so that farmers' multiple cropping can be restored, that sense of food uncertainty felt by people will be reduced considerably by a considerable increase in self-sufficiency ratio of grains and food and that negative environmental effects of agriculture will be considerably reduced.