With enough buildable land already, Japan promotes the Basic Act on the Revitalization of Urban Agriculture
After the "Urban Agriculture Promotion Basic Act" was passed last year, on May 13 this year the government announced the establishment of the "Urban Agriculture Promotion Basic Plan." Farmland that had previously been regarded merely as "green space" was finally put on the right footing, and there are also plans to cultivate new farmers and re-examine the tax system for urban farmland, giving positive recognition to the value of urban agriculture.
Under the "City Planning Act," urban farmland gets little attention
Japan established the "Farmland Act" as early as 1952; farmland not only cannot be bought and sold at will The high taxes made it impossible for farming families who wanted to cultivate the land to keep going, and they had no choice but to sell their land in pain. Otake Michishige, who at the time worked at the JA Central Union and once brought farming families to the Diet to petition, recalls those days: "The City Planning Act was established after the Tokyo Olympics (the exact time was 1968). At that time Japan was in a period of high economic growth, everyone was desperately crowding into the three major metropolitan areas, houses and big buildings were going up everywhere, and no one thought cities needed farmland." Although the "Productive Green Space Act" was enacted in 1974, allowing land designated as productive green space to receive tax reductions and enabling farmers to continue cultivating it, it does not fall under the category of farmland, nor can it be included within the scope of agricultural promotion policy, so it has not received the attention it deserves. The newly formulated basic plan gives urban farmland a clear positioning: it is no longer a "reserve army of building land" but an "indispensable part" of the city. The legislative background is related to changes in consumer awareness in recent years. Local production for local consumption, advocated for many years, has become a national consensus, and food and agriculture education and hands-on activities are flourishing; because of the painful lessons of the Great East Japan Earthquake, urban farmland is regarded as an important disaster evacuation site. In addition, as Japan's population declines year by year, demand for new housing has decreased not only in rural areas but also in cities in recent years, so farmland naturally does not need to be converted to building land. The "Urban Agriculture Promotion Basic Plan" sets out three major directions: "cultivating urban farmers, securing farmland, and promoting agricultural policy," with concrete measures including supporting existing farmers, cultivating new entrants to agriculture, re-measuring land use plans to preserve urban farmland of a certain scale, and re-examining the related tax system. Urban farmland valued the same as building land has continued to decrease every year. According to a 2012 survey, farmland in the three major metropolitan areas had fallen to only 13,000 hectares, less than half of what it was ten years earlier. In addition, as Japan strengthened the levying of inheritance tax starting in 2015, Aoyama Yu, chairman of the Tokyo Metropolitan Agricultural Council, urged the government to accelerate its pace of measurement. Besides measures related to farming management, urban farmland is the best place for citizens to get close to agriculture and to develop food and agriculture education. Promoting citizens' farms, setting up bases for learning about agriculture in urban parks, and expanding agricultural experience in school education are also within the scope of the plan's review. Aoyama believes that letting young people see agriculture firsthand and get close to it will be an important key to solving the shortage of successors. (Articles in the [Japan Correspondence] series are funded by a special grant from the Cheng Chen Environmental Education Foundation 
New policy: farmland is an indispensable part of the city, promoting urban agriculture
[Japan Correspondence] Japanese farmland is even cheaper than Taiwan, China's; the Farmland Act safeguards farmland for agricultural use
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