THE ROAD TO INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
THROUGH AGRICULTURE

By Yukinori Miyanaga
(Age 17, Japan)

Up till now, mankind has built up the foundations for a stable life by producing food to live on and passing this knowledge down from children to grandchildren through the ages. But in recent years, problems of food shortage have emerged in various parts of the world, and countless numbers of people are dying of starvation this very minute. In the years to come, the most important thing will be to secure food so that people around the world can live without worry.

After graduating from middle school, I decided to go to Harima Agricultural High School. Securing enough food for the world's people has become a very important issue and I have this vision that agriculture as an industry will play an important role in solving this problem.

Ever since I was very small, I have enjoyed working up a sweat and I have found the knack of performing difficult physical tasks without much difficulty. Rather than studying at a desk indoors, I always preferred classes out in the open, where I could use my whole body in the process of learning something. That's why I chose agricultural high school because the emphasis there is on getting experience by actually doing farming tasks and that was what I wanted to learn. Since I started at the school, I've become interested in organic farming where chemical fertilizers are not used, and my special interest is growing crops with the help of mallard ducks, something that the whole school is involved in.

Growing crops with the help of ducks means using no chemical fertilizers whatsoever and relying on the ducks and people's own hands and sweat to grow rice. This is true organic farming. Up till now, I had only known about rice growing where it was taken for granted that fertilizers are used, so I became very interested in the duck method. Besides the hours spent in the paddies at school, I attended the National Duck Forum held in Kobe last year, and I also spent a week of the summer holiday in Kyushu at a farm that used ducks. I wasn't sure how much I would be able to learn in just one week, but I made good use of my ability to withstand hard labor and spent a truly worthwhile week learning about the method in action on the spot. What's more, I got a firsthand idea of the difficulties faced by farmers, and in that single week, I realized how hard a job it is to produce food to feed the people of this earth.

The thing that impressed me most was how thoroughgoing and comprehensive this farming using ducks was. First of all, you get a crop of rice from the paddies. And then, besides their important role in weeding and eating insects, the ducks are also farmed as poultry. What's more their droppings in the paddies becomes food for loach and carp which, too, become food for humans. In other words, in a very limited space, you can produce rice, poultry and fish all at the same time. In this way, with the minimum of labor and cost, you can gain a fair amount of food. If this farming method with the help of ducks can be spread around the world, it will surely solve the global food problem.

My dreams for the future involve joining JICA, the youth volunteer movement, and going to various parts of the world to teach agricultural technology, and at the same time, I hope to spread this campaign of using ducks for farming. I know it won't be easy to make my thoughts and ideas understood in countries with different cultures and languages. But someone has to do this job, otherwise the food shortage problem will never be solved. That's why I want to take the initiative and go to developing countries to help them improve their farming methods; this is my way of contributing to the world.

As a first step towards achieving my goal, I want to go to the agricultural department of a university and acquire deep knowledge of agriculture. That will be the start to playing a role in bringing peace and coexistence to the whole world, where everyone can live in a safe environment.