Where is Japan in the land rush debate?

ABSTRACT

Japan’s place in the land rush debate is puzzling. While core arguments in the literature imply that Japan should be a significant source of large-scale overseas farmland investments, the country had a relatively low profile in the debate’s early years. I investigate this puzzle by asking both whether Japanese corporate and state actors have been surprisingly uninvolved in the land rush and whether their involvement is underreported. I find that they have played a larger role than the literature suggests, but that the nature and (to some extent) timing of Japanese initiatives, along with the debate’s framings and priorities, have discouraged attention to Japan.

RÉSUMÉ

Le peu de place accordé au Japon dans les débats sur l’accaparement des terres est déconcertant. Alors que les principaux arguments énoncés dans la littérature prédiraient que le Japon soit la source d’investissements importants dans des terres agricoles outre-mer, ce pays a été relativement peu discuté dans les premières années où ces questions ont été débattues. J’examine ce mystère en posant deux questions: les entreprises japonaises et l’État ont-ils peu participé, étonnamment, à la course aux terres? Leur participation est-elle sous-estimée? Je conclus qu’ils y ont participé de manière plus importante que ne le suggère la littérature, mais que la nature des initiatives japonaises en ce sens et, dans une certaine mesure, le moment où elles ont eu lieu, ont fait en sorte de décourager l’étude du rôle du Japon.

KEYWORDS:

• Agriculture
• food security
• land grab
• political economy
• Japan

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the LDPI Global Land Grabbing II Conference at Cornell University, 17–19 October 2012; the XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology in Yokohama, 13–19 July 2014; and the ForFood Workshop at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, 18–19 August 2014. I am grateful to the participants in and organisers of those events, and to Liz Clements, Sayaka Funada-Classens, Matt Gaudreau, Ariane Goetz, Eric Helleiner, Takeshi Ito, Matias Margulis, Sarah Martin, Kana Okada, Oane Visser and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I also thank Matt Gaudreau and Maxime Marcotte-Bouthillier for their research assistance, and Haroon Akram-Lodhi for his guidance and patience. All errors are my own.

Notes on contributor

Derek Hall (PhD, Cornell University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research focuses on the political economy of food, agriculture, land and environment in Japan and Southeast Asia. He is the author of Land (Polity, 2013) and, with Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, of Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (NUS Press and University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).

Notes

1 http://www.maff.go.jp/j/kanbo/kihyo02/basic_law/pdf/basic_law_agri.pdf, accessed February 10, 2017.

2 Calculated by author.

3 Calculated by author.

4 Calculated by author.

5 Calculated by author.

6 http://www.landmatrix.org/en/about/.

7 Calculated by author.

8 Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d’études du développement 33 (4) (2012); Development and Change 44 (2) (2013); Globalizations 10 (1) (2013); Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4) (2010), 39(2) (2012), and 39 (3–4) (2012); Third World Quarterly 34 (9) (2013); and Water Alternatives 5(2) (2012).

9 Calculated by author.

10 The phrasing evokes the yakuza movie series Jingi Naki Tatakai, usually translated as Battles without Honour and Humanity.

11 All dollar figures in this article are US dollars.

12 See Hall 2019 for sources on the next three paragraphs, and Sano 2016; Oliveira 2017, 315– 318.

13 NEXI also provided risk insurance for Mitsubishi’s salmon farming business in Chile, in part on the grounds of securing stable food supplies for Japan (E-NEXI 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Short-Term Research Grant and a Travel Grant from Wilfrid Laurier University (2014).