By Hannah Kirshner

A recent shortage of rice on supermarket shelves in Japan has been pinned on the large number of tourists visiting the country as well as hot weather exacerbated by climate change. But farmers and agricultural analysts say there’s something else at play — a decades-old government program that pays farmers not to plant rice.

Mako Sato’s rice fields span over 100 acres in Kaga, a town in Japan’s coastal Hokuriku region. 

Sato, who comes from a long line of rice farmers, said that because last summer was unusually hot, more of her harvest was cracked or blemished than usual. Those poor-quality grains can’t be sold as table rice and instead get processed into things like rice crackers.

But the lackluster yield brought lessons that she said paid off this year.

“We learned, and I think this year, we did a good job of things like taking measures against insects and heat and letting cold water into the paddies frequently,” she said, adding, “All of our rice is first-class this year. It looks good.”

However, television news reports in recent months have shown empty rice shelves in Tokyo supermarkets and people waiting in long lines to buy this year’s new rice crop.

Rice policy expert Kazuhito Yamashita, a fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies who retired from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), said that the shortage actually started months ago.

MAFF cites last year’s unusually hot weather and this year’s record high numbers of foreign tourists as causes of the shortage. 

An average of 3 million people a month are visiting Japan, surpassing a government goal of reaching the prepandemic level of tourism.

But Yamashita said, “Three million people do not stay in Japan in the entire month. They just stay in Japan for seven to 10 days.” 

Even if all those tourists ate rice at every meal, he estimated that would only amount to a 0.5% increase in rice consumption.

Last year’s extreme heat definitely impacted the rice harvest, but Yamashita said that the real reason for the current rice shortage is government policy: a so-called set-aside program that pays farmers not to grow rice (and instead convert paddy fields to other uses).

Many countries, including the US, use set-aside policies to reduce grain surpluses and stabilize prices. What’s unusual, according to Yamashita, is that Japan has kept this policy in place for more than 50 years — usually, these are short-term price control measures.

Japan’s set-aside program, Yamashita said, is at odds with another government goal: to increase Japan’s food self-sufficiency. 

“We should boost our production,” he said. 

According to Yamashita, the best way to do that is to end the set-aside program, subsidize farmers’ production of rice instead of paying them not to, and export the surplus. In case of emergency, the surplus could be kept in Japan.

Takuma Hasegawa, another rice farmer in Kaga, confirmed, “There are subsidies to grow other crops, like soybeans or wheat in the paddies, not rice.”

Hasegawa explained that most of Japan’s rice farmers don’t farm full-time. They work another full-time job and grow rice on the side.

“These farmers are no longer making any profit,” Hasegawa said. “They are only farming for the sake of protecting their land and maintaining community in the countryside, not to make money.”

More and more of these part-time farmers are quitting or aging out of farming. Direct subsidies to farmers could make it more appealing for younger farmers like Hasegawa to start or expand a rice farm.

But Hasegawa isn’t waiting for that change — he’s sidestepping the system. In his warehouse, a signboard is filled with a few dozen names of what he calls “rice field owners.” 

These customers make a five to 10-year commitment to prebuy the harvest of an entire rice field. 

“It takes a lot of money to start a new farm or increase the area of your farm, to buy machines and hire people,” Hasegawa said. 

With this system, the farmer has less risk. because they don’t have to worry about whether they can sell the rice. (And since Hasegawa practices natural farming, he doesn’t have to worry about the rising cost of commercial fertilizers and herbicides — his operating expenses are fairly stable.)

His customers share some of the risk of a poor harvest, but they benefit from a direct connection to the farmer.

“The consumer can rest assured that a share of rice is coming to them,” Hasegawa said. “There are a lot of people worried about a food crisis in the next five to 10 years.”

Even now, as freshly harvested rice hits the shelves, consumers are buying it right away. That means by this time next year, there could be a similar shortage. 

Published Date: October 11, 2024