Shoppers rejoice, farmers fume as Japan’s rice crisis turns into a surplus

Last year, Japan was flooding its rice market with emergency stockpiles in a bid to mollify voters angered by the soaring price of its staple grain. Now, it has the opposite problem: a glut.

That is welcome news for shoppers, but the whiplash is hurting people like Hiroshi Asano, 59, who farms a relatively large 38 hectares (93 acres) of rice fields in Chiba, close to Tokyo. He expects to make a loss this year, and he is worried smaller-scale farmers would not be able to survive.

“I’ve been hearing about quite a few people who plan to give up this year,” Asano said, looking out across his windblown fields. The former trucker turned to farming later in life, first taking over his wife’s family fields and then expanding to land abandoned by relatives and neighbours.

Extremes of weather, including record rainfall in the past few weeks, rising costs for machinery and lower prices for their products have all added up to insurmountable problems for many in an already shrinking sector.