Early last fall I had the opportunity to travel to Japan as part of the United States Meat Export Federation’s (USMEF) Heartland Trade Mission.  We were a group of thirty or so.  A few weeks after doing so, I sent a brief report on the trip to Iowa Farm Bureau.  In the months that have passed, I still think about the experience, and it still shapes my thoughts on ag related policy.  I’d share some of those with you.

The Foreign Service Officers attached to the US Embassy in Tokyo, highlighted the high subsidy rate of Japanese agriculture and underscored the difficulty Japan is having in attracting the next generation back to their farms. Subsidy rates and the willingness of people to participate in farming has come up on most of the trips I’ve take overseas.

It was mentioned during the Ukraine Market Study Tour by a Dutch farmer telling us why he left his home. It was mentioned by his fellow Danes whom I shared lunch with during their tour of Iowa.  It was mentioned in Austria on a trip down the Danube valley.

Subsidies sometimes meant to help farmers be “sustainable” are actually undercutting the sustainability of those very farmers in places.

We saw beef carcasses auctioned at a packing plant in the middle of downtown Tokyo. On the cattle side it left me thinking about all the discussion on market structure and pricing that is taking place here. There, the Japanese grading system offers value well beyond prime.

It does so in a country with a birth rate so low the population isn’t replacing itself.  There is a high number of single person households.  From beef to produce, their grocery market is more differentiated, and each variation seems to offer different elasticities of demand.

Beef is no longer just beef.

The demographics aren’t just particular to Japan.  The US birth rate is dropping.  A generation is emerging that places a great deal of value on experiences.  In comparing the Japan and US markets, our current level of differentiation has a ways to go and have a lot of value yet to be discovered.

It isn’t just the characteristics of the product that determined value.  It was also the characteristics of the brand.  The most common theme on the trip, be it in talking with an importer, a processor, or a retailer, was the continued evolution of branding.

Is furthering the development of a brand any different than furthering the development of a story?  Doesn’t it equate to developing value as much as the development of our product does?

USMEF’s role in matching the right product, at the right quality level, with the right story can’t be understated.  I wish everyone that raises beef back home got a chance to see USMEF’s work with their product overseas.  Critics will point out we only export 13.5 percent of our beef, and this is true.

But I’d like to point out that 95% of the world’s population lives outside the United States.  In the next 10 years the Asian middle class will swell to be 10 times population of the US.  They’ve demonstrated a desire to emulate Japan’s appetite for US beef.

Some critics back home also say the value of these export efforts aren’t reaching the producers raising the animals.  This in spite of the fact that the export market added $320 per head in market value last year.  They argue the promotion of our product should be outsourced more to others in the industry.

It is as though the other segments of the industry aren’t going to pass the cost of their having done so back down to us.  The real fallacy, however, lies in the turning over of our story to someone else.  Letting someone else tell your story usually makes you a character in their story.  Once you’re a character in their story, you lost control of it.

In my third time to Japan, I still haven’t heard much about individual animal traceability.  What they seem to want is traceability of a brand.  What I want is that story coming back not to characters, but the real people that raise the product.  It comes back to them because they are the ones telling the story for themselves.

Here we are abuzz with talk about alternative proteins.  They weren’t something Japan was talking about. It surprised me, particularly because of their low self-sufficiency in meat products, but then again, they have a stable government, relatively high income, and a consumer focus on quality.

When you look at the greater region, however, you see other countries with the same low self-sufficiency, but with less of the other attributes. If animal health issues continue to be a concern, alternative proteins might look to be a pretty stable way to keep a people fed.

Speaking of stability, I would mention one story on trade. Ground season pork used to be a big driver for the US in the Japan market. The tariff situation complicated it. Even with a new trade deal on the horizon, that complication won’t go away. The Japanese found another source for their product in the purchase of a Canadian plant. They put some skin in the game, and invested in solutions that didn’t include us.

I think about this in light of the trade deal with China.  In the midst of the discussion of how many soybeans China will now buy, I think about the skin they may have put in the game with Brazil.  It would be hard for them to walk away from that.

If you think about it, they are part of that story now.  That’s a valuable thing.