Which is scarier, the news that Japan launched an aircraft carrier on the de-facto national peace day in August, or the fact that our relatively chemical-free, labor-intensive, and totally delicious agricultural sector will be flattened under the Monsanto steamroller? Because that is what opening our "politically sensitive" food lifeline will entail.

Here's what The Japan Times online edition reported today:


Move pressures Japan to open up farm sector

Four TPP members offer to kill all tariffs

Kyodo



Sep 21, 2013

WASHINGTON – Four of the countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership initiative are offering the other members total tariff elimination on all agricultural and industrial goods, a source close to the talks said.

The move by Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Chile is likely to put pressure on Japan, the second-largest of the 12 TPP economies, to open up its politically sensitive agricultural market, the source said Friday.

What, exactly, is TPP?

By now everyone in Japan has heard the acronym TPP, and we know the ruling party (and not its coalition partner) wants Japan to join, but no one seems to know what membership in it involves. According to the following excerpt from a report by an organization called Public Knowldedge, the lack of transparency is deliberate. More alarming, not everyone is excluded from the discussion--only We the People.

Does anyone out there really like the sound of "special interests" in the same sentence as "privileged access"?


Here's the salient part of the Public Knowledge commentary:

"The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement ("TPP") is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by nine countries: The United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Although the TPP covers a wide range of issues, this site focuses on the TPP's intellectual property (IP) chapter.


The TPP suffers from a serious lack of transparency, threatens to impose more stringent copyright without public input, and pressures foreign governments to adopt unbalanced laws.


Many of the same special interests that pushed for legislation like SOPA and PIPA have special access to this forum—including privileged access to the text as well as US negotiators."

TPP?!

Even though almost everyone in the real world of Japan is against it, our Prime Minister has declared Japan will join the TPP. Never mind local sourcing of food, some aspects of the economy might possibly rise by a fraction of a percent, he says. He also is quoted as follows, concerning Japan's ability to persuade the TPP people to allow Japan Japan's rules: Abe admitted that “it will be difficult to overturn rules already set” by the 11 TPP member countries in past rounds of talks.

It is frightening to think that the land that currently has the world's greatest longevity--due largely to food culture--is turning over rules concerning food supplies to the land that gave the world fried butter.