Control of Agriculture with Debts
During a meeting at which was discussed the internationalization of agriculture, Ibuka Masaru, the Honorary President of Sony, said that "Agriculture has only 1/1,500th the productive power of industry." Since money as well is produced at 1,500 times the efficiency of food, it too functions according to the same logic as industry does. (For example, let us say that you borrow money from the bank. If you turn out goods at the rate of several tens a minute, you can pay back the principle with interest in only a short time. Or, if you move several thousand units of your product around in a certain way, you can always pay back the money you borrowed for capital.) But Nature moves according to very slow rhythms, and agriculture is bound by the laws of Nature; to try and make agriculture move at the fast pace of money inevitably means that agriculture will be left behind. Should one borrow money in order to get started in agriculture, one will find that, even if the interest is half what it would be for business or industry (or even if one gets someone to pay the interest for one — for example, a subsidy), it will be quite impossible to pay back the loan by means of agricultural produce alone.
The same goes for dairy farmers in Hokkaido, for those who raise cattle, for those who raise broilers and laying chickens, for citrus farmers, for mechanized farmers, and even for the American farmer, the incarnation of the large-scale modern farming method (it is said that, as of 1985, American agriculture is 54 trillion in debt). And this is not the only way money oppresses agriculture, for it has yet to rout the farmer decisively. * * * If, for example, there is a bumper crop of cabbage, the total cost of harvest, sorting, packing, shipping and kickbacks at the market is sometimes far greater than the selling price of the cabbage. The more the farmers ship, the more money they lose, and so there are times when they plow the cabbage into the fields with a bulldozer.
The more the farmers work (the more food they offer the city), the more money they lose. Has there ever been such an idiotic system? And that is money economics for you — the devilish machine (the market principle) invented by the city.
It is quite true that, after a certain point, one needs no more agricultural products since stuffing oneself full might bring about digestive disorders. An excess of other products will not bring about indigestion, and as long as one has a place to put them, it is possible to have many in order to feed one's vanity. It is the market principle that takes advantage of this one weak point of agriculture.
The market principle — another way of expressing this is "business." For example, the price of eggs is not decided as a result of competitive selling on the market; in actuality, a few market big shots make the decision after seeing how many and what kind of eggs are being shipped into the market at Tokyo. Local prices are based upon the price in Tokyo, so when Tokyo gets a lot of eggs, the price in other places is low even if there are not enough eggs. Therefore the market principle is a business technique, the art of wheeling and dealing.
Back a hundred or so years ago, this was a tea-producing region. Every year at tea-picking time the broker would visit the farmers. "This year the price of tea is higher than ever. Give it everything you've got, and pick every last leaf."
Joyful at the news, the farmers would work their hardest, squeezing every last bit out of their tea fields. The broker, watching for the moment when the tea was ready, would run breathlessly to the farmers with a telegram in hand: "This is terrible! I've just received a telegram from Yokohama — the price for new tea has fallen to rock bottom!" Thus it was the simplest thing for the merchant to use business technique to deceive the farmers.
Thus the merchants, waving the golden banner of "market principle," used the necessity and preservability of agricultural products to their own advantage. We must not fall for such tricks. Food is none other than that which supports life. Even if the harvest brings in more than is needed, the food that ends up in the stomachs of the idlers must have, as that which supports their lives, a very great value. If, Mr. Ibuka, agriculture has only 1/1,500th the productive capacity of industry, then agricultural produce must have 1,500 times the value of industrial products, right? This is the true market principle, and the just appropriation of value. A proper deal would exchange 1,500 transistor radios at 30,000 each for one bag of rice.
Thus the market principle is a tricky scheme whereby the merchants do the same with the essential portion of agricultural produce (i.e., that which goes into the bellies of the idlers) as they do with the excess — they cause the price to hit rock bottom. In Nature, where there is no such scheming, there is also no market principle. No matter how many zebras there are, if all it takes is one to fill the belly of a lion, the lion will find infinite value in that one zebra.