The Asahi Shimbun | 21 October 2015
Japan mulls extra budget to bolster agricultural sector in wake of TPP pact
The government is preparing a supplementary budget to help farmers compete with cheaper imported crops under the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade pact, which obligates Japan to lift tariffs on many agricultural products.
Japan will abolish tariffs on 8,575 of the 9,018 items included in the 12-nation trade pact, which was struck earlier this month, the government announced on Oct. 20.
The tariff elimination ratio of 95 percent is the highest among all economic partnership agreements that Japan has concluded.
The nation will also have to remove tariffs on 1,885 agricultural, forestry and fishery products, which means 81 percent of all those products will be imported without tariffs in the future.
Tariffs on all categories of vegetables will be lifted, in particular.
While Japanese trade negotiators strived to retain tariffs on rice, barley and wheat, dairy products, beef and pork, and sugar crops, tariffs on 174 items in those five key sectors, equivalent to 30 percent of all those products, will be eliminated.
Akira Amari, the state minister in charge of the TPP, said Japanese negotiators successfully protected tariffs on “core products in the five sectors” after an Oct. 20 Cabinet meeting.
He added the government will compile a draft supplementary budget for fiscal 2015 by the year-end to bolster agricultural competitiveness by urging farmers to consolidate their farmlands and help farming operators export their products.
The draft budget will be discussed at the ordinary Diet session starting in January 2016.
When Japan partially opened the domestic rice market to imported rice under the 1993 Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 6 trillion yen ($50.01 billion) was spent on strengthening agricultural strategies over six years.
But most of the funds were used for construction projects and failed to significantly improve the competitiveness of domestic farmers.