Regarding the June 18 editorial, "Efficient use of farmland": I'm glad that the era in which Japanese clamored to buy cheap foreign farm produce rather than toil their own soil, and then convert farmland into more productive industrial sites and more profitable housing areas, seems to be over.
How much rich farmland has been lost because of this way of thinking over past decades? The Japanese should acquire the traditional European wisdom in which villages and towns are built on infertile wasteland and rocky hills, while fertile plains are reserved for farming.
Maybe it's time to rethink the globalization of agriculture and the liberation of protective tariffs on all farm produce. No doubt the aging of the farming population in Japan is the end result of this process, which has made agriculture appear less and less attractive to younger generations profit-wise.