Japanese Organic Farmers

Strategies of Uncertainty after the Radiation Crisis

Organic farmers protesting nuclear power. Photo courtesy Nancy Rosenberger

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear explosion showered the fields of Japanese organic farmers with radiation, but from northeast Japan down to Tokyo, they were swept into further crisis by the government’s pronouncement that plants and animals fed by local materials were more at risk than conventionally-produced or imported products. Suddenly, these organic farmers’ formula of organic production and distribution outside of the market collapsed; they could not provide safety for themselves and their consumers to cope with the health and environmental risks caused by Japan’s focus on economic growth since the 70s. While the validity of their oppositional worldview was reaffirmed, their lifestyle entered the incalculability of uncertainty.

In 2012 I interviewed 43 organic farmers, listening to embodied experiences and strategies of crisis. An older couple, organic farmers from coastal Fukushima, lost their land and will never retrieve the same level of livelihood. An elderly couple and their son in central Fukushima felt they had to keep cultivating their 300-year-old farm to maintain the meaning in their lives, yet he had decided not to marry and his mother joked with black humor: “Last spring there were more birds than usual and the greens came up really well; they liked the radiation.” A woman farmer from western Fukushima took her two children to her southern natal home and wanted her husband to follow, but he insisted on clinging to his farm in Fukushima. She said, “I feel a huge contradiction as a mother and as a farmer; as a consumer and as a producer.”

In irreversible crises anthropologists can clarify the creative assemblage of strategies that lay people produce. Since the explosion organic farmers have reclaimed some agency through what I call localized, relational uncertainty: a coping strategy that accepts incalculable risk by focusing on the local geography of their farm and relations of trust between farmers and consumers. Altogether their strategies constitute a continuum varying from risk management via neoliberal institutions, to precautions as lay experts, to what I term agency of uncertainty.

Techniques of Agency

At one end of the continuum, organic farmers utilized what Mitchell Dean calls techniques of agency in which people take individual responsibility to deal with risk as manageable just as neoliberal governance expects. For example, the elderly couple and their son in central Fukushima applied to Tokyo Electric Company for compensation. They had to produce myriad records of production and sales from previous years as proof for the company monitors. They also faced the difficult task of reporting on their actions during the chaotic period after the explosion. Although complete compensation was impossible and accepting corporate money was a compromise of their ideals to live outside the market, farmers accepted this limited method of managing risk. In another example of entrepreneurial responsibility, a 40-year-old farmer living in Ibaragi Prefecture south of the explosion, faced with consumer decline in his membership group, adjusted by selling his produce to restaurants delicious and seasonal, rather than as organic.

Techniques of Uncertainty

In the middle of the continuum organic farmers practiced what Patrick O’Malley has called techniques of uncertainty in which lay experts combine science and experience (guesswork, rules of thumb) to produce precautions in the face of irreversible uncertainty. Prevention was no longer possible, but organic farmers, mistrusting government and company experts, appropriated science to minimize harm for themselves and their consumers and allied with non-government organizations (NGOs).

For example, the organic farmers used gamma spectrometers, machines that would measure the bequerels (bq) (the rate of radioactive decay over a period of time) of cesium in their crops. The machines were expensive and necessitated allying with NGOs that bought them; each test cost farmers time and money. A farmer in Ibaragi Prefecture took ash and leaves for compost to a Seikyo (Coop) store that bought organic products from local farmers; their count was low and he decided to use them. As of April 2012 the government standard for food was 100 bq per kilogram, but organic consumers were demanding non-detectable. In central Fukushima, where the soil had been 1000 bq after the explosion, the farmers decided not to sell rice and soybeans at 100 bq, but with the help of NGOs selling on the web, they sold cucumbers and carrot juice measuring 2 bq.

The farmers felt profound responsibility for the judgment calls they made in relation to protecting their consumers. However, they coped through localized uncertainty which focused on a certain area and limited crops.

Lay experts emerged to defend organic farming and offer scenarios of possibilities. An older organic farmer in Ibaragi Prefecture argued publicly that organic farming reduced the radiation that went into crops because soil rich with humus locked up the cesium. He was unsure, but used knowledge from agricultural university and would experiment in the future.

Both measuring by machine and lay theories utilize science, but represent organic farmers acting beyond government and companies, allied with third sector NGOs in order to save their livelihood. The machines minimized uncertainty and the lay expert theories promised stabilization of uncertainty in the future. Neither however dismissed uncertainty or assumed risk avoidance.

Agency of Uncertainty

At the far end of the continuum, organic farmers reasserted their agency as a marginal group, embracing the post-explosion uncertainty of radiation and expressing a rationale that refutes the dominant logic of risk avoidance based on renewed economic growth. They built their identities and communities by living on the edge.

First, organic farmers actively accepted localized uncertainty. Although most had come to their communities as adults and were renting land, organic farmers threw ultimate caution to the wind in favor of their local farms and communities. Deciding the undecidable, one couple with three children living north of the explosion in Iwate Prefecture cited a new commitment to place: “We have decided to bury our bones here.” In Ibaragi Prefecture, a young couple said, “It comes down to taking the radiation or taking away this way of life. We have been here 10 years and we will stay. For the kids we have decided this too. Most of what the kids have eaten is what we have grown. Before it was good and now we aren’t sure. Maybe they are pitiful, but the kids have to stay with us.”

Second, organic farmers used relational uncertainty, urging their consumers to share an agency of uncertainty with them. A farmer of 43 in Ibaragi Prefecture laughed ruefully, “My friend had a party and invited people to eat ‘cesium beef’. We are all in it together.” Unlike most grocers, organic farmers told consumers the number of bequerels of radiation in the food they delivered. The couple in Iwate said, “We finally said to consumers, if it is okay, please buy it. This is a nuclear society so we eat the cesium. We should accept it because we are all victims of damage. It’s only a question of where the boundary is.”

These strategies of relational uncertainty, linked with localized uncertainty, extended into specific invitations to consumers to ally with organic farmers. The husband from western Fukushima suffered from rumor damage as much as from low levels of radiation. He urged a group of volunteers from Tokyo who came yearly to help clean the water channels for the rice fields to expand their commitment by buying rice from the village. He argued passionately that this crisis was a sign that there had to be a much deeper trust established between farmers and their consumers.

Furthermore, he and other farmers argued that the experience of nuclear uncertainty was a chance to think beyond economic growth and its dangerous underpinnings. A young organic farmer from southern Iwate gave lectures urging people to maintain their distrust of authorities and risk management. They should raise alarm about radiation levels in local areas; school lunches; and claims of safety at nuclear power plants.

Organic farmers used uncertainty as productive of new kinds of relationship, new relations with their locality, and renewed logic protesting economic growth. Although their strategies also included cooperation with neoliberal institutions, they negotiated this contradiction by banking their identities uncertainty experienced in localities with allies as well as on precautionary use of lay science. As Japan turns to economic growth and reactivated nuclear plants, organic farmers’ commitment to uncertainty constitutes a new form of subversiveness within the nation.

Nancy Rosenberger is a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, with her PhD from University of Michigan. She has written about changes in women’s lives in Japan and food insecurity in Central Asia and Oregon. She is presently researching changes in organic agriculture in in Japan’s society of risk.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/japanese-organic-farmers/