Similarly in the UK, the covid-19 layoff created a bunch of healthy and willing natives (= not seasonal migrant workers from Eastern Europe) who applied for their local farmer's crop harvesting effort. However, just yesterday (methinks) BBC reported that a chartered plane carrying the regular migrant workers from Eastern Europe was arriving to UK simply because there are too few people to work on the agricultural sector. Without their usual expertise, most of the crop would be left to rot in the fields.
Crop harvesting is not a simple task; it is quite complicated, highly-organised process. For some vegitables, workers are lying down on a rows of decks that mechanically moves forward as they pick up fresh produce from the ground.
Without local food, the nation is doomed. Import might suddenly stop incoming due to unforseeable reasons: natural disaster, terrorism, artificial disaster such as nuclear power station meltdown, massive labour dispute/strikes, etc.
Japanese hard-working taxpayers should know what is going on in terms of agricultural industrial protection, especially domestic seeds.
PLS spread the good news from Yamada-san, the former Agri Minister and now a campaigning lawyer by following his facebook timeline because his Ameba blog post would not be displayed in a timely manner for some reason (personally I suspect a sort of sabotage).
