Life Onboard LAST UPDATE  February 5, 2009
site design imagesparkle.com
January 23, 2009 Globalization, Agriculture and Food – Ono Kazuoki
image
Ono Kazuoki delivers a lecture in his series “Globalization, Agriculture, and Food” aboard the Peace Boat
The topics of globalization, agriculture and food were the focus of guest educator Ono Kazuoki's activities during his third voyage on board the Peace Boat. Born in a rural Japanese village, Mr Ono studied agriculture at university during the student movement of the 1960s. Historical events had a great influence on the philosophy he formed during his college years: “At the time of the Pearl Harbour bombing,” he said, “people in Japan suffered from malnutrition. Nowadays, that word makes you think of Africa and Southeast Asia, but back then, it applied to Japan, too.” Now a renowned agriculture journalist, Mr Ono warned participants that small, independent farmers were slowly disappearing, urging participants to consider the negative reverberations inherent in the current trend of globalization.
site design imagesparkle.com
image
Three women eat lunch after spending the morning working in a rice paddy in Viet Nam. Small farmers are increasingly struggling to make a living as large, foreign-owned corporations buy large swaths of land to produce extremely cheap crops aided by artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and genetic engineering
According to Mr Ono, globalization means two things. The first meaning is related to geography. With globalization, there are no borders in the world. “Before, some countries weren’t part of the market economy and they were self-sufficient.” But now, even tiny villages in small countries are being primed to enter the global market of international export and import, usually by outside contractors. The second meaning is related to quality. With globalization, everything becomes a product and is stuck with a price tag. The ultimate commercial goal is to make these products as cheap as possible. With the efforts to make these products extremely cheap, quality suffers. This is extremely important when considering food safety and even human rights, which are also commodified under the practice of open global markets.

Many people think that opening developing countries to the global market is a good thing. “They can compete with the industrialized world and eventually catch up to first world economies,” said one Peace Boat participant.. But Mr Ono believes that it often changes ways of life that had been based on thousands of years’ precedent and history. For example, in northern Thailand, many farmers practiced communal farming. If there were ten people in a village, they all shared some land. If one person didn’t need it, he gave his share up and waited until he needed it again. Everyone lived harmoniously, sharing the land. But according to the World Bank, that is not a true form of ownership. Each piece of land should have only one owner. So in northern Thailand, if those farmers want to participate in the global market, one person will have to buy the land, creating nine other landless farmers.

In globalization, it is often the richer country that profits. “Ethiopia has the most famines in the world,” Mr Ono said. “But at the moment, it’s one of the top exporters of roses.” Ethiopians themselves are not cultivating the roses - rich corporations from the Netherlands use the land because it is so cheap. Even when there are droughts, the companies use any available water for the roses. All of the profits from these roses, of course, go to Netherlands. Because the land and water are no longer available to Ethiopian farmers, they must then buy food instead of being able to grow it themselves. “Where does the cheapest food come from? China. So, they are drinking things like melanin-contaminated milk, because that’s all they can afford.” Contaminated food has been exported by China several times in the last few years, and Mr Ono believes that this is because employees are not forced to check health and quality controls, but rather to produce as much as possible as fast as they can. They are under constant threat of getting fired if they don’t make quota. What’s more, these Chinese factories are usually owned by Japanese or American corporations. “They treat their workers as disposable,” Mr Ono said.
image
Ono Kazuoki in Viet Nam, where he accompanied Peace Boat participants on a study tour in Da Nang
Mr Ono also lamented the loss of local farmers. Large corporations are able to produce much cheaper food by using expensive technology such as genetic modification and pesticides to yield a bigger, more efficient harvest. Small farmers can’t compete, and are forced to sell their fields at very cheap prices, usually to the very corporations who drove the farmers into debt. Mr Ono gave the example of small dairy farmers in Japan. Imported dairy has made the price of milk much cheaper than it was years ago, although now the price of feed for cattle is higher than ever. Dairy farmers must buy expensive feed to produce cheap milk. In the end, they make only 800 yen (about 8 US dollars) in profit a day. Milking cattle involves working from the early morning until late at night, meaning farmers work for about 30 yen an hour. “They can no longer live like this,” Mr Ono says.
image

A father and son sell melons in a street market in Viet Nam. Mr Ono stresses that as small farmers disappear, so does a culture that has thrived for hundreds of years
Mr Ono urged participants to think of how we can stop corporations from taking over the ancient tradition of independent farmers. Some ideas he mentioned were shopping at farmers’ markets; using prison labor to do farm work; and using compost instead of harmful fertilizers for crops. One creative solution involved a man who decided to utilize the leftovers from local children’s school lunches as compost, instead of using chemical-based fertilizers. Not only was he getting a free fertilizer, he was nourishing the entire ecosystem of the fields, while at the same time teaching schoolchildren about organic agriculture. As Mr Ono warns, losing small farmers also means each community is losing a part of their culture that is sometimes hundreds of years old.