Community | March 28, 2009 | 5 comments

Japan Fears a Shrinking Future for Rice Farmers

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/world/asia/29japan.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

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crazykatlady
SHONAI, Japan — This broad coastal plain near the Sea of Japan, blessed with abundant water and rich soil and checkered with rice paddies hued golden yellow in the early spring, is one of the country’s most fertile granaries. But there is an unmistakable malaise here.

A retired rice farmer in Yamagata in her greenhouse. Most of Japan’s three million farmers are older than 60.

The farmers who work the paddies are graying and dwindling in number. Abandoned, overgrown plots are a common sight. Because of how small their farms are and how far rice prices have fallen, many farmers find it impossible to make ends meet.

“Japanese agriculture has no money, no youth, no future,” said one farmer, Hitoshi Suzuki, 57, who stood on his 450-year-old family farm as an icy wind blew from the sea.

The troubles on the farm are emblematic of an overall feeling of paralysis gripping Japan, the world’s second-largest economy. Faced with mounting challenges from an aging population and chronic low growth, the nation has tried to preserve the status quo, in essence by burning through its vast accumulated wealth, rather than make tough changes, economists say.

“Japan’s rural crisis offers a glimpse of the entire nation’s future,” said Yasunari Ueno, an economist at Mizuho Securities in Tokyo.

To hear many farmers and agricultural experts tell it, rural Japan is fast approaching some sort of dead end, the result of depopulation, trade liberalization and depleted government coffers. They speak of the worst rural crisis since World War II. In Shonai, farmland prices have dropped as much as 70 percent in the past 15 years, and the number of farmers has shrunk by half since 1990.

Across Japan, production of rice, the traditional staple grain, has fallen 20 percent in a decade, raising alarms in a nation that now imports 61 percent of its food, according to the government’s Statistics Bureau.
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5 comments // Japan Fears a Shrinking Future for Rice Farmers

  • SPECIALIST
  • mik661
  • DeliaTheArtist
    • 0
      DeliaTheArtist  
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    • @Biscuit "The disease that is the US economy?" Really?

      I know things are fucked up right now, but take this into consideration:

      "The economy of the United States is the largest national economy in the world.[11] Its gross domestic product (GDP) was estimated as $14.2 trillion in 2008.[12] The U.S. economy maintains a high level of output per person (GDP per capita, $46,800 in 2008, ranked at around number ten in the world). The U.S. economy has maintained a stable overall GDP growth rate, a low unemployment rate, and high levels of research and capital investment funded by both national and, because of decreasing saving rates, increasingly by foreign investors. In 2008, seventy-two percent of the economic activity in the U.S. came from consumers.[13]

      Major economic concerns in the U.S. include external debt, entitlement liabilities for retiring baby boomers who have already begun withdrawing from their Social Security accounts, corporate debt, mortgage debt, a low savings rate, falling house prices, and a large current account deficit. As of September 2008, the gross U.S. external debt was over $13.6 trillion,[14] the most external debt of any country in the world.[15] The 2008 estimate of the United States public debt was 73% of GDP.[16] As of March 2009, the total U.S. federal debt exceeded $10.9 trillion,[7] about $37,850 per capita."

    • 2 years ago
  • Biscuit09
  • ddhboy
    • 0
      ddhboy  

    • Japan has been very protective of its rice, they don't even allow exports in fear that someone would cultivate the rice elsewhere and distribute it in Japan, dispite the fact that such a move would inevitably cause the foreign grown rice to cost more than that produced in Japan.

      Of course the rice industry isn't alone in this, able Japanese people simply aren't having kids, and if they are they only make 1. The situation in japan isn't something that will just happen for this generation, but will follow suit with generations to come. The simple way to solve these sort of problems would be to just increase immigration, but the Japanese people are too close minded about their "purity" that it hasn't been considered a feasible plan. I guess thats why Japan invests so heavily in robotics, but that won't save them.

    • 2 years ago
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