www.asianfarmers.org

Japanese Kobe cows have a beef, and Japanese chickens are broiling: In the first one and a half month’s of this year’s record hot summer 959 milk cows, 235 meat cows, 136,000 egg chickens, and 289,000 meat chickens have died of heatstroke. Pigs aren’t faring so well either, with 657 succumbing to the heat. These numbers are up only slightly from the last survey two years ago for cows and pigs, but more than double for chickens. The Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry, who conducted the survey, is instructing farmers to have adequate heat shield materials and ventilation fans in animal enclosures. The heatstroke figures do not include Miyazaki Prefecture, which suffered a foot-and-mouth disease breakout this year, muddling the ability to determine cause of death.

Read the story at CalorieLab

TOKYO (Reuters) – Chicken sexers in Japan once enjoyed well-paid careers with overseas travel and job security but industry changes mean their expertise is not needed so widely and less people are seeking to join the profession.

Chicken sexing — or determining the sex of chickens — is critical to lower costs as farmers need to know the sex of newly hatched chicks to match them to their next destination. Females are kept to lay eggs while a few males are retained for meat.

Chicken sexers can manually sort poultry at a speed of 8,000 chicks per day and 99.7 percent accuracy by learning to identify the external appearance of the birds’ sexual organs that are located within their bodies.

Most experts in so-called “vent” or “cloaca” sexing come from Japan, where the method of distinguishing patterns of birds’ sexual organs at one day-old was invented in 1933 and helped revolutionise the poultry business, with Japanese sexers in demand internationally for their skills.

But as Japan’s youth migrates to cities, fewer people want the job.

Read the full story at Reuters

Aug. 28 (CNA) Local opinion leaders from central Taiwan’s Taichung area called Saturday for locally grown fruit to be among the items received preferential tariff treatment from China while meeting a visiting Chinese official.

Legislator Yen Chin-piao and Taichung County Council Speaker Chang Ching-tang issued the call during a banquet with Zheng Lizhong, vice president of the quasi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, the Chinese body authorized to deal with Taiwan.

He is visiting Taiwan, however, in his capacity as deputy director of the Central Office of Taiwan Affairs of the Communist Party of China.

“Many Taichung farmers are very disappointed that their high-end products were not included on the first ‘early harvest list, ‘” Chang told the Central News Agency, referring to the list of items receiving favorable tariff treatment under the economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) signed with China in late June.

Read the full story at Focus Taiwan

Chiang Tsai-lang’s dedication to growing guavas for more than 40 years has seen him create a wealth of varieties, making his 4,850-square-meter farm in central Taiwan a “museum of guava” and a must-see attraction for anyone interested in his unique growing and cultivation techniques.

In addition to the common varieties of guava, the 68-year-old’s farm in Changhua County’s Yuanlin Township boasts such oddities as purple guavas and guavas that look like watermelons on the inside. To identify each variety, Chiang tags his trees with labels in various colors.

Chiang began to study farm management, pest control and growing techniques after becoming the first head of a local guava production and marketing group in 1989, and his work won him an “Outstanding Farmer” award from the Council of Agriculture in 2006.

Read the full story at Focus Taiwan

PHNOM PENH, 26 August 2010 (IRIN) – Late rains and record low water levels in Cambodia’s two main fresh water systems will affect food security and the livelihoods of millions, government officials and NGOs warn.

“We expect the impact to be very strong,” said Nao Thuok, director of the Fisheries Administration, adding that low water levels along the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers were already limiting fish production and migration.

Crucial spawning grounds in floodplains along the rivers remained dry. “The places where the fish usually lay their eggs do not have much water so the fish population will decrease a lot,” he warned.

Approximately six million Cambodians or 45 percent of the population depend on fishing in the Mekong and Tonle Sap basins, the government’s Inland Fisheries Research and Development Institute, reports.

Read the full story at IRIN

It is an idea that has attracted global interest – a robotic suit that helps elderly Japanese farmers – but it is one that has also highlighted the problems of an ageing rural population.

The exoskeleten can be strapped-on to farm workers and helps reduce the strain of more physically demanding tasks.

Most of Japan’s farmers are over the age of 60 and many people fear it is a profession that is completely dying out.

Presenter: Helene Hofman
Speaker: Takeo Ogawa, professor at Kumamoto Gakuen University and trustee of the Asian Aging Business Center; Masayoshi Honma, professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Tokyo; Mika Iba, Network for a Safe and Secure Food Environment

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VietNamNet Bridge – Though Vietnam is an agricultural country with 70 percent of its population living in rural areas, agriculture insurance has not developed. Phung Dac Loc, Secretary General of the Vietnam Insurance Association, talks about the issue.

Thoi Bao Kinh Te Saigon: Could you please tell us about the proportion of agriculture insurance in the non-life insurance sector in Vietnam?

Phung Dac Loc: Agriculture insurance premiums in Vietnam are inconsiderable compared with total non-life insurance premiums. The premiums in 2009 were modest at 1.7 billion dong, while total non-life insurance premiums were 13,644 billion dong. The figure was 958 million dong in the first half of 2010 vs. 8241 billion dong.

Get the full story at Vietnam Net Bridge

DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/44cce8/japan_agribusiness) has announced the addition of the “Japan Agribusiness Report Q1 2009″ report to their offering.

Japan Agribusiness service provides proprietary medium term price forecasts for key commodities, including corn, wheat, rice, sugar, cocoa, coffee, soy and milk; in addition to newly-researched competitive intelligence on leading agribusiness producers, traders and suppliers; in-depth analysis of latest industry developments; and essential industry context on Japan’s agribusiness service.

Despite having an advanced level of mechanisation and high yields, Japanese agriculture is largely unprofitable and is able to supply less than 40% of the country’s food needs. In this new Japan Agribusiness Report for Q1 2009, we examine the challenges that the agriculture sector in Japan faces over the coming years.

Between 1960 and 2005 Japan’s food self sufficiency in a calorie basis fell from 73% to 40%. Over the same period, the share of agriculture as a proportion of GDP dropped from 9% to 1% and the area of agricultural land fell from 6.09mn hectares (ha) to 4.60mn ha.

While Japanese agriculture has enjoyed some successes, such as achieving self sufficiency in milk and rice production, farming has never really been profitable without protection from imports and heavy government support in the form of subsidies and price supports. Even production of the key staple rice has fallen over the last two decades as consumption has dropped.

Read the full story at Business Wire

Manual labor is becoming more and more difficult for Japan’s aging farmers, prompting a Tokyo professor to devise a high-tech solution: mechanize the bodies of the farmers themselves.

Prof. Shigeki Toyama of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering is close to perfecting a robot suit that could considerably reduce the physical burden of farmwork on elderly farmers.

People aged 65 and older are a key pillar of the agricultural work force, accounting for about 60 percent of the agricultural population in Japan. Development of the robot suit may come as welcome news to such elderly farmers.

While agricultural machines such as tractors and rice planters have reduced farmers’ physical burdens, many kinds of work still depend on manual labor, such as harvesting fruits and vegetables or pruning the branches of fruit-bearing trees.

Read the full story at Psyorg.com

In what is being described as a landmark case, a Taiwanese owned manufacturer has made an out of court settlement with thousands of Vietnamese farmers who claim pollution caused by the firm significantly effected their livelihoods.

Vedan Vietnam, which makes food additives including monosodium glutamate (known as MSG), reportedly discharged waste water in such quantities into the local river that it killed the ecosystem. Thousands of fish and shrimp farmers claimed the toxic waters killed their catch and ruined farmland along the river’s banks. Vedan has admitted responsibility and offered compensation worth US$11.5 million to farmers in three provinces.

Presenter: Bo Hill
Speakers: Huang, Vietnam Farmers Union; Le Viet Hung, director, Natural Resources and Environment Department, Dong Nai, Vietnam

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