compared to these European countries regarding imports of agricultural, forestry and fishery products. The amount of these import by Japan was 5.6% of the total world trade value of these products in 1961, but had nearly doubled to 9.4% in 1994, whereas the same shares for France and Germany have not changed much and they have been around 6% and 10% respectively over the same period, and it for the Great Britain had reduced from 15% to 6%. The import value of these products in Japan increased thirty-fold from US$2.3 billion to US$70.6 billion from 1961 to 1994, whereas it for Germany increased twelve-fold from US$4.2 billion to US$51.9 billion. Japan has developed its economy by emphasizing more industrial production and export after the war in contrast to the European countries, and as a result she has neglected or depressed the domestic agricultural, forestry and fishery industries by increasing greatly the import of these products.
Prawn imports for example by Japan have been mainly from Asian countries, and in 1962 it was only 3,642 tons with a value of 2.2 billion yen, which was 46% of the total import value of fishery products, but by 1991 it had risen to 310,000 tons with a value of412.9 billion yen, which represented 24.5% of the total import value of fishery products. The import volume of prawns increased 85 times during this period. Mangrove forest on the Thai and Indonesian coasts have widely been destroyed and substantially polluted by prawn farming for export to Japan. In another example, the import value of wood to Japan was US$930 million in 1967, and it rose to US$7.47 billion in 1990. Most of these were imported from the tropics (27% of the total import value of wood came from Malaysia and Indonesia in 1990) and it caused the destruction of tropical forest.
When Japan announced the official import of 2.5 million tons of white rice in September 1994 during the Heisei rice crisis, the rice trade price at the this world rice trade market doubled within four months in Thailand and America, and the retail and farm rice prices in Thailand and Indonesia increased between 7-30% within 4 months. 35) Japan agreed to increase its import quota of rice from 4% of her consumption in 1995 to 8% in year 2000 in the Uruguay Round
