I wonder if it is an aftereffect of the gyoza incident happened through February to March, but the imports of Chinese-made foods have decreased 28%, which is approximately 21 billion yen. It is surprising how much people are afraid of and have prejudice against Chinese-made foods right now. But we should be more careful before easily say that, “Chinese vegetables are dangerous and Japanese vegetables are safe.”
From 1990 to 2006, the total imports of vegetables from China had increased from 25% to 57%. Many of them were for professional use. For example, most of Japanese pickles sold in Japan are made in China, even some famous brands that all of us must have had eaten before.
Therefore, it is time for us to shift our national policy from just reducing or abolishing use of insecticides to improve the self-sufficiency in food. However, it costs much more to deal with vegetables than rice, since the government doesn’t give grants to vegetables like rice. Vegetables also don’t stay good very long. The reality is that not much profit is left to the vegetable-producers after paying for the boxes and other distribution costs.
Moreover, when the year has a too good harvest, the price goes down to half or even to one-third, and the producers have to dispose the harvest directly to the field. Also, there is a fact that large-scaled farming is hard to function in Japan. Fields are often mottled or mosaic, as it is hard to get a?large area to farm. So a large-scaled intensive farming (e.g. with large tractors seen in the U.S.) is not realistic in Japan.
The soil fertility in Japan has become very weak because of the continuous house growing for a ling time. The soil doesn’t have enough minerals and amino acids to be absorbed by vegetables anymore; instead, it contains a lot of cancer-causing nitrite-nitrogen.
If the soil does not contain enough nutrition, vegetables cannot photosynthesize well to produce enough glucose sugar, vitamins, and scent-producing components. The sent of vegetables smells good for human beings, which gives us an image of freshness and stimulates appetite. But for harmful germs, it works as if an insecticide. So the weaken vegetables with little vitality have less sweetness, scent, fiber, and get soft and rotten easily because of its weak antioxidant power. It seems that we need to learn about vegetables more seriously.
In China, farmers have become to select insecticides very carefully for the vegetables they export to Japan and other countries, compared to the vegetables consumed domestically. The recent gyoza incident was a man-caused poisoning case happened in a selected and well-supervised factory. (Probably both governments believe so.) These poisoned gyoza were supposed to be very safe, reassuring gyoza. In this world today, where the food self-sufficiency of many countries is worsening rapidly and fights are about to break out over food, we should consider whether China really suffers if we stop importing vegetables from China.
The income level is increasing in urban areas of China. These people are eager to buy the foods for export, because these vegetables, meats, fruits or frozen gyoza are more secured and reassuring than those they usually buy in China. As a result, China can produce enough profit with domestic demand, even if Japan stops importing foods. On the contrary, Japan should be able to cover it with domestic production, or the price of vegetables is presumed to rise 30% to 40% within a year.
Only 4% of all agricultural products are grown organic in Japan. This figure might be even including grain. After all, both Japan and China should take this kind of unhappy incident as a good chance to review the country developmentally and constructively, and to exercise some new actions.
