"Cradle to Cradle"

Today's speaker was Christina Cheng and Magnus, of course guest was Christina. She is a business person who works mainly with food companies, and supports them to catch a trend. Thanks to her background lecture was rather practical than academic. She used many transparencies and told us some example of company.

“Cradle to Cradle”, I had never heard about that, was most interesting concept for me,












This is so nice! This is what I am considering because my major is agricultural economics! This city can self-produce sustainable food and energy.


Her Trendspotting steps is following:

1,Start on familiar ground
2,Make it their business
3,Go practice
4,Inspire to change
5,So what analysis

Only rice is cheaper !

Price of commodities in Stockholm is about twice as much as that in Tokyo.
However, there is a opposite example; rice.

In Stockholm, price of rice is about half that in Tokyo.
Considering about PPP, price of Japanese rice is around 4 times as much as that of Sweden. This is because Japan protects their rice market from international trade.

"Rice is soul of Japan!", Japanese farmers say sometimes.
This is partly true because historically, rice had been used as money in Japan, and now, preserving sceneries or communities in rural area.

Thinking about that, Japanese government has kept price of rice higher, and this deprived farmers from ingenuity or insentive for making money. In other words, soil was protected but soul was lost.

I do'nt think Japan should completely stop protection of rice, but I believe should change the policy now.

Can Japan buy foreign fields ?

How can food-import-countries secure their food ?

As you know, Japan has large population in small country; people 12times more than that in sweden live in land smaller than sweden. Besides, land reform that was enforced in 1947 divided farmland much smaller. Moreover, wages in Japan has became very high because of rapidly developing after WWⅡ. Such factors has made Japan depended their food on other countries.

Now, because of increasing price of grain, Japan is worrying about their food self-sufficiency raito that is the lowest rank of OECD nations. But strangely, Japanese concern is only domestic matters such as changing eating habit or joining their small farmland for improving productivity.

This article introduced us the measures of other food-import-country, and show the solution that buying fields in foreign country to secure foods. That is very reasonable. I think Japanese should think such solution because it is too late when food crisis happens or other country keeps their land for foods.