This is interesting. It is also worth noting that England long ago abandoned the effort to produce most of their own foodstuffs. The point about agricultural machinery is well taken, though. The last time that England came close to feeding itself was during the Second World War when they made a serious drive to grow their own grain once again. It took several years, but they largely succeeded. They still, of course, relied heavily on imports, and with the submarine menace, that made it an anxious situation for them. Due largely to the efforts of the Royal Canadian Navy, which escorted more convoys that the United States Navy and the Royal Navy combined, and which convoyed food stuffs grown in Canada, the English never truly faced starvation--but they had to do without a lot of things, and that situation continued until long after the war.
Both Japan and France have been fanatical about producing enough food to feed themselves within their own territory. In both France and Japan, farmers remain a political force with power out of all proportion to their mere numbers. For the Japanese, the equation of rice-production to population has been a critical issue for more than a thousand years. Documents from the Tokugawa shogunate at the beginning of the 17th century show that average annual rice production was about 25,000,000 koku
. There is argument about exactly how much rice is in a koku
, but it is generally thought to have been 170 litres. The definition of the koku
for the purposes of the Japanese was the rice required to feed an adult male for one year. At the time in the Tokugawa shogunate when the country could expect a harvest of 25,000,000 koku
, the population of Japan was 30,000,000. That's cutting it pretty damned close. Even considering that women, children and the elderly probably didn't need a koku
to meet their rice needs for a year, it's obvious that there was no surplus. By 1900, Japan could no longer rely on producing enough rice to feed its population, and the seizure of Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1911 were prompted in large measure by the need to secure agricultural supplies. Today, they don't even come close. They still protect the home industry with very high tariffs on the importation of grain rice, but prepared rice products come almost exclusively from outside the country. In the case of sushi, the rice cakes upon which sashimi is served, the largest producer of the rice used is California.