U.S.-Japan FTA Will Cost Junnosuke Kobara at Nikkei provides analysis showing that while Japanese farmers may be few in number, they have outsized influence when voting as a bloc. The analysis is important because there is an Upper House election in two weeks, and the Abe government is negotiating a free-trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S. His analysis finds that farmers are extremely sensitive to liberalized trade, but they can be bought off. Thus, Prime Minister Abe has tripled the amount of land adjustment spending to over $5 billion and created a $4.5 billion supplementary budget for farmers.   Varied GMO Approaches In Europe, protestors have been known to burn down any fields they’ve found growing GM crops. In the U.S.,...

TAGS – Asia, India, North America