Public policies to nourish"slow"businesses under environmental risks

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The word business often associates "fast" or "speedy". However, the concept of "slow" seems to become important under current environmental risks. Doing things quickly requires a lot of resources, especially energy. On the other hand, we can reduce the impact on the environment by doing things slowly, for in stance with the help of natural processes. However, "slowness" and "business" have been considered to be incompatible. The aim of our research is to clarify how public policies can help to connect "slowness" and "business" in a compatible way.We first have case-studied on food, leisure and housing industries. What we observed was the lack of communications between the suppliers of goods or services and their consumer. The information gap creates unreasonable price difference between the "slow" and "fast (or conventional)" goods or services. Sometimes the slow gets lower prices, and the fast higher, and which sends the message that the slow is lower quality.In Canada, where organic food market is performing better than in Japan, the consumers seem to pay more attentions to what they buy. "Slow" business companies are more eager to convey the information about their products or services to the consumers. Regarding to this, public sectors have to offer assistance to the businesses. Another role of governments is to provide guidelines or standards to businesses in certain area.We have participated in many domestic/international conferences. Among them was Sakai's lectures on "the role of globalization and the scientist in Asian economy", invited by the South Korea science academy, Seoul, May, 2004. We have also invited various speakers. In March 2006, Dr.Mathis Wackernagel and Dr.Yoshihiko Wada joined us and discussed how to apply the ecological footprint analysis in policy making process. The outcomes of this project have been published in various journals as listed in this report.