Agriculture will save Japan, they seem to think. Yeah, and Arbeit macht frei:
Seeing agriculture as one of the few industries that could generate jobs right now, the government has earmarked $10 million to send 900 people to job-training programs in farming, forestry and fishing. Japan’s unemployment rate was 4.4% in February, up from 3.9% a year earlier, but still lower than the U.S. or Europe. Some economists expect the figure to rise to a record 8% or so within the next couple of years.Policy makers are hoping newly unemployed young people will help revive Japan’s dwindling farming population, where two in three full-time farmers are 65 or older. Of Japan’s total population, 6% work in agriculture, most doing so only part time, down from about 20% three decades ago.
“If they can’t find young workers over the next several years, Japan’s agriculture will disappear,” said Kazumasa Iwata, a government economist and former deputy governor of the Bank of Japan.
This is a painful example of the make-work bias. In fact, agriculture is the canonical example of a sector where jobs have disappeared, and it has been a good thing. Farmers make up just two or three percent of the modern American work force.