How Kyoto vegetables achieve local production and local consumption in the city
The Council of Agriculture has designated this year as the Year of Local Production and Local Consumption, and central and local agricultural authorities alike are striving toward local production and local consumption of local ingredients, proposing various measures to that end. Local production and local consumption is also an important policy that Japan has used over the past decade to raise its self-sufficiency rate for domestically produced food and to invigorate local economies. After years of promotion, localities across the country not only compete over the terroir and quality of their ingredients, but also vie with one another in the creative flair of their local production and local consumption attractions.
Taiwan and Japan interact frequently, and information flows quickly between them. The various approaches to local production and local consumption promoted by rural localities in Japan are not unfamiliar to people in Taiwan, but is local production and local consumption something only rural areas are equipped to promote? How can urban areas promote local production and local consumption? This article is based on the author's observations during a trip to Kyoto in March of this year, supplemented by written interviews with the officials in charge of related affairs at the city government, and is written in the hope of offering Taiwan's agricultural sector a reference for thinking about local production and local consumption strategies.
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For a long time, Taiwan's agricultural development has followed in Japan's footsteps, while Japan has followed in America's. In an era when agricultural industry took yield and internationalization as its sole goals, the "One Village, One Product Movement" that Japan once promoted was introduced into Taiwan as "One Township, One Specialty." At some point, people began to reflect on the harm that industrialized agriculture brought to the environment and to rural development, and "One Village, Many Products," which values ecological diversity, was proposed anew.
In recent years, the local production and local consumption policy put forward by Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has likewise drawn the attention of Taiwan's agricultural authorities. The convenience of globalized transportation does indeed provide the material basis for local production and local consumption; however, the reason Japan's local production and local consumption has succeeded is absolutely not its reliance on One Township, One Specialty winning out through volume. If we cannot shake off the myth of food globalization and blindly expand the scale of agricultural production, hoping to promote local consumption of agriculture through agricultural free economic pilot zones, the result may well be the opposite of what we intend.
Local production and local consumption of agricultural products carries, to some degree, a sense of resistance toindustrialization and gigantism. It differs from the old concept of selling the best agricultural products to other places or other countries; on the contrary, it emphasizes keeping the best in the place of origin. This development path hopes to use the tourism appeal created by ingredients to draw visitors, that is, the foundation of local production and local consumption is built on the rich culinary charm jointly formed by diverse local products. A term newly proposed recently is called "ingredient tourism," and its logic is very similar.
From the case of Kyoto we can see that in future local development, "local ingredients" and "local production and local consumption" will be important keywords. Local operators should think about how to take locally distinctive ingredients as the core and build a beautiful, pollution-free ecological environment, an accessible experience space for producing, making and enjoying ingredients, and more opportunities for culinary cultural exchange.
(Chang Wei-chi / Associate Professor, Department of Environmental and Cultural Resources, National Hsinchu University of Education)