Abstract
While neoliberalism has promoted free trade, market rule, and productivist agriculture in the food production system, farmers and their unions in developed countries partially managed to shun the forces of neoliberalism. What are the underpinning strength and factors of such resilience? Discussions have concentrated at national policy and organizational level and tacit resistance at community and farm levels remain unexplored, inter alia from their historical embeddedness perspective. This study explores the way Japanese farmers frame their contemporary political situation with neoliberalism of the late 2000s with a grounded approach of face-to-face interview at a community level. The farmers resist it mobilizing Scott’s anthropological notion of “Weapons of the Weak” through story-telling instead of hoes in ancient time (Scott JC, Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance, 1985). In concrete, the farmers resisted a neoliberal policy of Hinmoku Ōdanteki Keiei Antei Taisaku, or the Multi-Product Management Stabilization Plan (MPP), in the early 2000s, which promoted larger scale farming to pursue the efficiency of scale merits. The policy was first introduced in 2005 as a concept and dominated the agricultural policy scenes from 2007 to 2009, and then its influence disappeared toward 2010. The rise and fall of the concept and policy provide us with rare opportunity to examine the historical embeddedness of the farmers and their resistance to such neoliberal globalization. We conducted interviews with the leaders of cooperative farms and stakeholders in Daisen City, Akita Prefecture, Japan; the study found that farmers’ framing of neoliberalism was ambivalent causing partial adoption and resistance. The leaders of the cooperative farms could form the cooperative farms but thought further development difficult because members intended to keep their farming independent. Close frame and discourse analysis revealed that farmers in Japan could express their frustration on neoliberal discourse and policy through multiple tactics of “Weapons of the Weak” by complaining to the leaders, miscalculating the figures, or claiming family-based food sovereignty that “we produce what goes into our family mouths.” Such tactics procrastinated the process and eventually stopped the policy. The incident demonstrates how farmers in the network can slow the progress of neoliberal discourse and policy implementation. From the analysis, the notion of “Weapons of the Weak” can be applied as a part of the combination with farmers’ historical embeddedness, symbolism of foods, framing, and electoral resistance.
Highlights
Rice is one of the most traditional staple dishes in the Japanese society in the East Asia region
This study interviewed about the process by the leaders of cooperative farms in Daisen City, Akita Prefecture, in 2009 in order to understand how farmers involved in the notion “Weapons of the Weak” on the ground could frame, adopt, and resist neoliberal agricultural policy through measures in Japan (Fig. 5)
Neoliberal discourse toward the MPP While the Japanese government started to recognize neoliberalism in the 1980s, the Uruguay Round and the following WTO negotiations added the neoliberal discourse to agricultural policies in Japan
Summary
Rice is one of the most traditional staple dishes in the Japanese society in the East Asia region. In Japanese rural communities, agriculture has played fundamental roles in the environment, society, and economy, let alone rice in the northeast part of Honshu, the Tohoku region [1, 2]. Producing rice was embedded in a rural community in an extensive way to mobilize an entire village in farming seasons in the area (Fig. 1). A rice production region has historically added ingeniousness to rice dishes; for example, Akita Prefecture is known for kiritanpo, half-pounded mochi stretched on a wood bar (Fig. 2). People put it in a pot with chicken and vegetables (Fig. 3). Owing to globalization of the agri-food system, the Japanese government pursues more economic efficiency in farming, and this challenges how farmers understand their farming, decide farming practice, and mobilize their agricultural communities
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