HAYATO ISHII: CAN JAPAN MODEL ITS AGRICULTURE ON THE NETHERLANDS?
Can Japan Model its Agriculture on the Netherlands? The Netherlands has made active use of IT and AI to boost the value of its agricultural exports, becoming the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products after the United States. The Abe administration is seeking structural reform of Japan’s agricultural sector based on the Dutch model, but could there be some blind spots in that pursuit? Here I consider what Japan should learn from the Dutch, drawing on my own observations from a visit to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the traditional rural landscape of windmills and tulips is giving way to wind power generation equipment and high-tech glasshouses. The marrow of the Netherlands' agricultural policy is a strong R&D setup grounded in cooperation among business, knowledge institutions, and government bodies. In 1997, a business-knowledge-government cluster built around the University of Wageningen some 90 kilometers east of the capital Amsterdam was dubb...