Japan is struggling to keep its farms running as farmers age and young people shun the work. This has opened the door for more foreign workers — including a growing number found to be working illegally.
The number of Japanese farmers has dropped by about half since 2000, to below 2 million this year, according to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.
About two-thirds of those who remain are 65 or older.
This could slow Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push for a renewal of the sector. Abe sees agriculture as an important driver of economic growth and has urged farmers to target overseas markets with premium products.
Japan’s agricultural exports hit a record last year, according to the agriculture ministry, thanks partly to a weaker currency. Abe’s administration has been looking to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to expose Japanese farmers to more competition and improve productivity.
The pact, which brings together 12 nations including Japan, might be in doubt with the US presidential election campaign fueling protectionist sentiment.
A shortage of farm workers means the rise in exports is not sustainable, said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at the Norinchukin Research Institute, which specializes in agriculture.
Younger Japanese simply are not interested, he said.
“It’s easier to be a salaryman,” Minami said. “You can’t be a farmer unless that’s your passion.”
One result is the rapid rise in productive farmland being abandoned.
Some farms are tapping cheap foreign labor. Japan generally does not accept migrant workers, but many companies use a so-called internship-training program as a back door.
About 7,000 foreign workers entered the agriculture sector through this program in 2013 after passing exams at the end of their first year, according to the Japanese Ministry of Justice. That is more than double the number in 2007.
Authorities last year caught about 1,700 foreigners working on farms illegally, about triple the number just three years ago, according to the ministry.
About 60,000 foreigners remained in the country without permission as of Jan. 1, according to the government.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the