Rethink on rice policyーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS
Tariffs aren’t the only headache for Japan’s ruling coalition. Stubbornly high rice prices are another problem that won’t go away. The government is under intense pressure to find a long-term solution. In the short term, things aren’t getting any easier. The latest data out Friday shows the cost of a 5 kilogram bag of rice in the week up to July 27th was 3,467 yen or $23. That’s an increase from the week before. The government’s response to the rice crisis has been to flood the market with emergency reserves. Prices have eased, but the impact of that strategy now appears to be waning. Persistent concerns about supply shortages and spiraling prices are now forcing the government to rethink its approach over the long term. Before now, I don’t think there’s been any policy initiative by the agriculture ministry to boost rice production. I’d like to set a course for a major new policy direction. In years gone by, the government had the opposite problem. A steady decline in rice consumption meant Japan had too much. In 1971, the government introduced a policy to reduce rice patty acreage across the country. It also subsidized farmers to leave their fields or grow other crops instead. That remained official policy until 2018. Even after that, the government paid farmers big subsidies to harvest rice for animal feed rather than human consumption. Right up until last year, the government was still forecasting demand would fall by 100,000 tons annually. Farmers responded by growing less. As we know now, decades of production cutbacks combined with other factors created a perfect storm for the industry. The result, a dire shortage and a surge in prices that left the government well and truly on the back foot. For more insight, I spoke to Yamasta Kazuto. He’s an expert on rights policy. Yamasha says the government has the correct idea, but it’s going to take time to write the ship. We have resorted to the exit reduction policy for uh for more than half a century. So it is very difficult to change the policy overnight because some interest group wants a higher price than the than the market determined price. Apart from the political uh situation you know the farm uh the farming age is very high like maybe 70 and over. So is it possible to increase the production of rice in this situation? More than 50% of the of the rice farmers are cultivating the farmland less than one hectare. It’s a very small scale farmers and it is very inefficient if we get get rid of the exit reduction policy and if we could lower the rice price and then the small scale ineffic inefficient partn farmers would part with their farmland to the full scale bigger size farmers. So in your scheme uh it would be more profitable to produce rice farmers who could operate a farm brand with more acreage then you could reduce the cost of rice production and you could increase the profit of the rice farming. So th those farmers could compete in the world market. So they could expand their the amount of export in the world markets. When do you think this could happen? I mean like people are you know concerned about the rice price and the availability of rice for the next harvest which is just coming up. Uh do you think the rice price will come down? Do you think there’ll be more increase in rice? What is your prediction? The current rice econ production is is still in place right now. So we couldn’t drastically substantially expand rice rice production within one year or so. The problem is that the agriculture co cooperatives have already offered the farmers very high rice price. So given the the very high high rice price, it is very difficult for for the Japanese government to reduce the the rice bread for the for the consumers. So no relief anytime soon for struggling households then. But Yamashta is hopeful the policy shift will deliver results in years to
A surge in Japan’s rice prices has prompted a change in government policy on production. An expert explains when consumers can expect to see results. #business #japan #rice
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