Agriculture and the state in industrial East Asia: the rise and fall of the food control system in Japan

Abstract

State intervention to protect and support the agricultural sector represents a significant element in the political economy of most industrial countries. Central to this in the Japanese case has been the so‐called Food Control System, the regulatory structure within which the government has sought to ‘guide the market’ for rice throughout die post‐war period. The system had its origins in war‐time food rationing but continued to evolve, in response to changing economic and political pressures, until a crisis point was reached with the ‘Heisei Rice Riots’ of 1993/4 and the conclusion of the Uruguay Round agreement to open Japan's rice market to imports. The New Food Law, passed in the wake of these events, is thus widely seen as heralding the demise of the system which has determined how and at what price consumers have purchased their rice throughout the period of Japan's rise to economic super‐power status. In this article, which is derived from research for a comparative study of East Asian agricultural policy and institutions, the rise and fall of the Food Control System is viewed as a case study of the attempts of the ‘bureaucratic developmental state’ to manage the agricultural sector within the context of the industrial economy that Japan, like the other East Asian countries, has now become.