The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) prohibits discrimination in all its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, and, where applicable, sex, marital status, familial status, parental status, religion, sexual orientation, genetic information, political beliefs, reprisal, or because all or a part of an individual's income is derived from any public assistance program. (Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) Persons with disabilities who require alternative means for communication of program information (Braille, large print, audiotape, etc.

Japan's agriculture has been inward oriented, protected by trade barriers from foreign competition. Even though the share of Japan's food consumption provided by Japanese production has gradually fallen, Japan's farm sector remains the second-largest among the countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Japan's food industry is increasingly integrated with TPP economies, although the TPP share of Japan's agricultural imports has fallen over time. The proposed TPP agreement would lead to more agricultural exports to Japan from TPP partners, likely dominating the total agricultural trade impact of such an agreement. Despite potentially large import increases, especially in the rice, beef, and dairy sectors, the proposed agreement would only marginally reduce Japan's output. Intrinsic strengths of Japanese agricultural production and constraints to the growth of supply in the rest of the TPP countries may limit the impact of the agreement on Japan's agriculture. Nevertheless, U.S. exports would be well positioned to meet Japan's new import demand.

Several studies indicate that not only age but also cohort effects exist in consumption of selected food products, although the latter are rarely explicitly specified in the ordinary econometric analyses of food consumption. These two demographic variables are significant in magnitude and often differ in pattern. Where the population is aging rapidly, as in Japan and Korea, it is inevitable that ''structural changes'' take place in the demand for certain products, because of the change in the composition of consumers. In this article, we first derive individual consumption of fresh fish, traditionally a major source of animal protein in Japan, by age from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, where the original data are classified by age groups of household head. A cohort table based on the individual consumption estimates is then decomposed into age, cohort and period effects first and then the period effects are regressed against prices and income to determine the economic demand elasticities. We also attempted an alternative approach: a cohort analysis augmented with economic variables, to determine economic demand elasticities in one step. Even after age, cohort, price, and income effects are accounted for, non-negligible residuals remain unexplained, which may need interdisciplinary investigations.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) prohibits discrimination in all its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, and, where applicable, sex, marital status, familial status, parental status, religion, sexual orientation, genetic information, political beliefs, reprisal, or because all or a part of an individual's income is derived from any public assistance program. (Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) Persons with disabilities who require alternative means for communication of program information (Braille, large print, audiotape, etc.

The productivity, precision and performance benefits of Smart Manufacturing are unleashed when there is frictionless movement of information-data in context, at the right time, among systems, operations and people, that can create value within and across all manufacturers and all sizes of plants throughout enterprise supply chains. Line of sight to the full economic potential of Smart Manufacturing requires business, leadership, market and infrastructure realignments for the "democratization" of "smart" business, technology, operational and workforce data practices industry-wide. Access and the ability to effectively use operational data in cyber operations (Operational Technologies, OT) that are enabled by Information Technologies (IT) and the knowhow to deploy Smart Manufacturing solutions are therefore increasingly important to small, medium and large manufacturers, providers, integrators and innovators alike, but increasingly constrained with today's manufacturing infrastructure practices. Addressing democratization, breaking through barriers and transforming manufacturing to a new data centric orientation are key objectives for CESMII, the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute, the third Institute sponsored by the Department of Energy and the ninth out of the fifteen Manufacturing USA national institutes (see https://www.cesmii.org).