I want farmers to have jobs too. I'd still find it sad if that were the rationale here, though, because while protectionist measures can save jobs, they remain one of the worst tools to do so, typically costing several hundred thousand dollars per job.
Tire manufacturing jobs saved at $900,000 per job: https://piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/us-tire-tariffs-...
Textile jobs saved at a cost of $4 million per job: http://www.heritage.org/report/the-textile-and-apparel-trade...
Sugar quotas costing $800,000 per job: http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/41418/
Those are all US examples. Maybe the Japanese are better at saving jobs through protectionism and get a better return on their restrictions, but those are 10-100 times the salaries in those fields. It seems unlikely they are closing that gap.
Sadly there's just no free lunch. It's like the second law of thermodynamics for economies.
When you shut down economic activity to improve health and welfare, that's fine, you can accomplish a lot that's useful for society.
But when you try to shut down economic activity to create wealth, you generally pay far more than you were trying to save.*
* With the possible exception of infant industry protection, but that's controversial, and hardly an exact science. Either way, potato farming is hardly some new technology where Japan is likely to corner the global market once they build up a little more volume.
There's such a thing as no lunch though, a situation one may find themselves in if their job is re-accomodated to a global location with "higher economic efficiency".
The rock on the other side of this hard place though is that there's also no lunch at all for someone who can't afford basic foodstuffs because of tariffs and quotas block access to reasonably priced goods.
What's worse is that trade protections tend to be incredibly regressive, hitting those shopping for basic necessities hardest, far more than people who can buy yachts from whatever jurisdiction they like.
How do we confront this dilemma? How do we thread the needle? We've never really pulled it off correctly in the past... but there is a way to do it.
If you have real trade assistance programs, then you create a situation where every single person is better off under trade liberalization. The problem is we've talked a good game on trade assistance, but never done it right, and never really reevaluated what works and doesn't.
It doesn't mean three year retraining programs for people five years off from retirement. It's going to include mix of solutions, including some small taxes on goods likely to be imported and straight up wealth transfers to former employees. Relocation assistance or retraining if they want it, but some people won't.
If protectionism costs $800,000 per job, then this is easy. Just tax that good, give the worker their old $60k/yr salary for a few years, no questions asked, and let consumers pocket the difference. You could pay them $60k for life and we'd all still be better off, but some people might prefer a phase out, either way.
Is that a real threat though? I mean, we've had some form of equilibrium in economies for thousands of years, some people do better than others, but people more or less "get by". Whereas now, I have the feeling that we are very quickly getting into dangerous uncharted territory. I see very little reason why China couldn't make 70%++ of everything needed by the entire planet, with some exceptions here and there. And I don't see how UBI is going to solve that problem, if entire countries essentially no longer have any income, since they no longer do anything.
> If protectionism costs $800,000 per job
From a quick look at that report, the quote I found is "In 2006 a Commerce Department study found that three candy-making jobs are lost for each sugar growing and processing job saved by higher sugar prices."
Personally, I'd need something a bit more substantial before I'm going to believe the massive numbers thrown around on the cost of protectionism, especially considering the likelihood of them being propaganda.
Welp, that dead-ends conversations.
As a personal disclosure, I neither consider myself complicit with propagandists nor a total sucker. A partial sucker maybe...
I tossed three citations out there because I'm familiar with research on the topic and found those results fairly typical. But I get it, you don't find any of them particularly persuasive. You may not be inclined to listen to any countervailing evidence at this time. That's fine.
If you ever want to poke around at this topic again but are seriously skeptical about finding information you can trust, consider Googling the IGM forum.
The forum surveys economists across the political spectrum on various issues of economic policy.
You'll find massive splits on all sorts of issues, vast disagreements on how to best organize the economy. If you read the bios or works of the participants, the ideological differences of opinion will become fairly stark.
You might find that variety of opinions more reliable in and of itself, or you might simply find some individual you consider reputable on the forum.
From there you may find someone with interesting things to say that you'll trust more than me.
I don't expect you'll find a radically different view on trade, since there's fairly broad agreement that freer trade helps the average citizen, and helps society more than it hurts.
But who knows. Maybe I'm wrong.
Best of luck either way.
Grandparent didn't suggest a problem with protectionist regulations - simply that the regulation is the probable cause of the shortage. There is a link.
Japan is peculiarly vulnerable to potato shortages because it restricts imports, even when its own potato crop fails.
I mean, let's say all of your crops failed. So what? Just buy them from another country. It's a little more expensive, but better than starving.
So why do people starve? It's when your money can't buy anything from another country because people from other countries don't have faith in your currency. Or when you can't trade at all for some reason.
Famines are chiefly an economic problem.
Admittedly we are getting away from the example of Japan here where there isn't really a serious danger of famine either way without a drastic change in material conditions.
Obviously, the Irish Potato Famine was caused by bad government. Instead of being allowed to keep their own potatoes, the government of occupied Ireland, run by Britain, forced them to export them all.
South Korea had a massive shortage of chicken eggs last winter due to an avian influenza epidemic. It took only a few weeks for the government to start importing fresh eggs from abroad, something that had never been done before. It wasn't enough to get prices down to normal levels, but at least the government acted quick -- especially considering that the nation was in the middle of a Presidential scandal.
Unlike South Korea, Japan is essentially a single-party dictatorship. They can pass whatever laws they deem necessary if they really want to. I'm assuming that they don't want to, probably because there's someone who profits from high potato prices.
Japan‘s agricultural system was intended to be a temporary prop, to help agriculture recover after the War. The people would experience inflated prices and erratic supplies, but that was thought a price worth paying.
The system has been kept in place for decades longer than its stated purpose required. The forces that keep it in place are powerful, and democratic only in the loosest sense of the word.
And for the record, I don't think it was ever intended to be a temporary measure. The whole reason a million people died of hunger after WWII was because there was no local production of food. And not only that, there was no centralised food distribution system, so even when food became available, there was no way to get it to people.
Nobody that I know of complains about about the agricultural system here (granted, I live in a farming community :-) ). The only people I see complaining are people with foreign interests who want to dump their produce in order to destroy production in other places in the world (as a Canadian, I will say that our country has historically been one of the worst in the world for this).
The biggest problem is really that all of the farmers are dying of old age and nobody in their families want to continue, so I suspect that the "pretty major" thing will probably happen sooner rather than later. I feel strangely thankful to Trump for killing TPP so that the solution is less likely to be selling out to foreign interests.
I did (granted, I have a background in Economics).
Tell a Japanese how much a tin of tomatoes costs in Japan compared to the US or the EU, or a mango, or even a packet of generic acetaminophen (paracetamol) for that matter.
Now ask them why. Nine times out of ten, they’ll say something about the Japanese culture of quality and attention to detail. To be fair, Japan often does demand higher standards, but that’s not nearly enough to explain the full price discrepancy.
They don‘t complain because they don‘t know what’s going on.
The government also disallows the sale of farming land. This ensures that you don't have a few mega operations taking over all of the farm land. If you want to start farming in Japan, you will have no problem because land is available. If you want to start farming in the UK? Good luck unless you have millions of pounds to get started. Even then you probably won't be able to get any land.
In order to ensure that the land is in productive use, land owners get government subsidies when it is. Again, this ensures that land is available for farming.
Compare the amount of money that Japanese farmers get for their produce to US or European farmers. Compare the markup that US and European distributors charge to that of the JA. If you think Japanese farmers don't know what's going on, I think you are very much mistaken.
In Japan, a farmer’s vote has roughly twice the weight of an urbanite’s.
In a sense, their society has chosen this structure, in which case it's not even a subsidy, it is the natural price.
Good, they can do something more useful with their time because Japan does not have a comparative advantage in farming. Having farms in Japan is very inefficient, since there are better regions to grow these crops.
Sure, you can't displace these farmers tomorrow, but slowly increasing the imports is a good idea. For one thing, it would decrease the cost of living for the average Japanese person, even if farmers are negatively affected.
Why is a farmer more important than a city dweller?
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/trump-and-abe-us-may-struggle...
indeed, it seems it's hard to get a good trade deal with Japan (asking for low tariffs on American imports)