SUGITO (Japan): Rice farmer Noboru Yamazaki, 57, vividly remembers the crop failure of 1993.

In the worst harvest since World War II, consumers desperate for the home-grown product paid him 50,000 yen (416 dollars) for two 30 kg bags that he was saving for his family to eat — more than three times the price he can get today.

Ironically, it is an overabundance of cheap rice in the face of sinking demand, not crop failures, which some experts say is putting the country’s 2,000-year-old rice culture at risk.

“If things keep going as they are, Japanese rice farming will be destroyed,” said Isoshi Kajii, professor emeritus with Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. “The culture of Japanese rice farming culture will completely disappear.”

After a series of bumper crops and sinking demand, last year Yamazaki ploughed up some 300 square meters of immature rice stalks as part of an “emergency” government programme to cap chronic oversupply and boost sagging prices.

Yamazaki, like most Japanese rice farmers, is a part-timer — his real job is as a gardener — but the 550,000 yen (4,580 dollars) per year in sales he gets from the rice harvest provides handy extra income.

The government has gone to great lengths to support farmers by slashing supply in a bid to boost prices. Last year, it disposed of 110,000 tons of rice — enough to feed 1.7 million Japanese people for a year — by using it as fodder for pigs, cows and chickens.

In the year to March 2002, some 20,000 hectares of immature crops were ploughed up and farmers were paid to leave 40 per cent of the country’s 2.6 million hectares of rice paddies fallow, but critics say nothing has worked to eliminate the glut.

Prices have fallen 28.4 per cent from their peak in 1993, while per capita consumption of rice has plunged to 64.6 kgs a year, about half what it was 40 years ago, government documents show.

As affluence has increased in the postwar period, the Japanese diet has shifted increasingly towards greater meat consumption and Western alternative staples like bread and potatoes.

Despite increasing the amount of fallow fields by some 30 per cent over the last five years to 1.01 million hectares, output targets are constantly overshot, and prices continue to fall.

Kajii said the main culprit is the 1994 Staple Food Law that allowed farmers to sell outside official channels for the first time.

While the government’s agricultural co-operative associations stockpile or dispose of excess output, some 40 per cent of farmers now sell directly to retailers and ignore production controls, inflating supply and pushing down the price, he said.

Masami Ishizuka, a senior Food Agency official, said subsidies to encourage farmers to not plant rice were also unfairly distributed.—AFP