"Ed" <gwbush@whitehouse.com> wrote in message
news:bq29n5$jve$1@cobalt01.janis.or.jp...
> I'll let you in on a few J-farmer secrets.

Exactly. The government is propping up an inefficient system rather than
getting them to compete. That's not going to help anything, just prolong the
inevitable. And even with these lame handouts, you can't get any young
people to farm these days. And that's pretty sad, considering Japan's
current economic situation. People would rather work in a Circle K than
farm. Make farming a competitive industry, and people will return to it.

And with some exceptions, agricultural products really are pretty shoddy
here. Farmers peeing on their crops? I have seen farmers burning furniture,
plastic, and tires, and spreading the ashes over their fields. I have seen
Japanese farmers irrigating their crops out of rivers that a factory has
been dumping into upstream, then washing their own nitrate-packed overflow
right back into the river for the folks downstream from them.

The upshot is that most Japanese agricultural products have no better
quality than Chinese imports, and are probably no safer, despite their
higher price tag. But we should be forced to buy them anyway, due to some
misguided government policy?

-- 
Regards,
Ryan Ginstrom