{"title":"Giving Agricultural Production Priority over Environmental Conservation in Rural Engineering Research","authors":"S. Yoshida","doi":"10.11408/JIERP1982.1994.27_1","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Agriculture in Japan is currently facing a serious crisis. While total imports of agricultural products reached a total value of approximately \\4.05 trillion in 1991, making this country the world's largest net importer of agricultural products, Japan's self-sufficiency in food has been dropping steadily since 1960. In 1991 Japan satisfied only 46% of its people's total calorific intake from domestic production, with self-sufficiency in cereals a mere 29%. Japan is the only country with a population of over 20 million people which has a calorific self-sufficiency of less than 50%, and is well below the average self-sufficiency for both industrially advanced countries (110%) and developing countries (90%). In fact, Japan was ranked 136th in terms of self-sufficiency among the 155 countries listed in FAO statistics for 1980, with Hong Kong, Singapore, Brunei and Macao being the only countries in Asia to rank lower than Japan. The fact that Japan alone has such a low level of self-sufficiency among the industrially advanced countries indicates that industrial growth is not necessarily accompanied by a decline in agriculture under a capitalist economy. The trend in Britain, where the calorific self-sufficiency ratio grew annually from 48% in 1970 to 73% in 1988, when self-sufficiency in cereals was over 100%, has been quite the opposite to that in Japan. Neither is Japan's low level of self-sufficiency a result of low productivity due to lack of suitable farmland and other natural constraints . This is clearly borne out, for example, by the fact that total wheat production was","PeriodicalId":137099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of irrigation engineering and rural planning","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of irrigation engineering and rural planning","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.11408/JIERP1982.1994.27_1","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Agriculture in Japan is currently facing a serious crisis. While total imports of agricultural products reached a total value of approximately \4.05 trillion in 1991, making this country the world's largest net importer of agricultural products, Japan's self-sufficiency in food has been dropping steadily since 1960. In 1991 Japan satisfied only 46% of its people's total calorific intake from domestic production, with self-sufficiency in cereals a mere 29%. Japan is the only country with a population of over 20 million people which has a calorific self-sufficiency of less than 50%, and is well below the average self-sufficiency for both industrially advanced countries (110%) and developing countries (90%). In fact, Japan was ranked 136th in terms of self-sufficiency among the 155 countries listed in FAO statistics for 1980, with Hong Kong, Singapore, Brunei and Macao being the only countries in Asia to rank lower than Japan. The fact that Japan alone has such a low level of self-sufficiency among the industrially advanced countries indicates that industrial growth is not necessarily accompanied by a decline in agriculture under a capitalist economy. The trend in Britain, where the calorific self-sufficiency ratio grew annually from 48% in 1970 to 73% in 1988, when self-sufficiency in cereals was over 100%, has been quite the opposite to that in Japan. Neither is Japan's low level of self-sufficiency a result of low productivity due to lack of suitable farmland and other natural constraints . This is clearly borne out, for example, by the fact that total wheat production was