Rice Fields Reflecting Invisible Hunger Japan's Agrarian Reform Plan and the Era of 40% Self-Sufficiency (around 2008)

Rice Fields Reflecting Invisible Hunger Japan's Agrarian Reform Plan and the Era of 40% Self-Sufficiency (around 2008)
Around 2008, Japan's food self-sufficiency rate had remained stagnant at around 40% for a long time. 80% in the 1960s, the self-sufficiency rate has plummeted with the westernization of food and increasing import dependency. The global grain and oil price hikes of 2007-2008 exposed this weakness, and heightened the sense of crisis over food security. In Japan, the long-standing policy of reducing rice acreage in response to the surplus of rice has resulted in rice paddies being converted to other crops or left fallow, leading to a decline in the efficiency of farmland use and an increase in the amount of abandoned farmland. Against this backdrop, the Agricultural Land Reform Plan presented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF) aimed to increase productivity through farmland accumulation and support for bearers, and to reduce dependence on imports by strengthening domestic production of wheat, soybeans, feed crops, and other crops. The plan also promot
ed the development of a system to encourage corporate participation, and was expected to serve as a model for the utilization of idle farmland. At the same time, however, there remained concerns about the survival of small-scale farmers and the abandonment of mountainous areas, and there were also fears that the maintenance of rural communities, the passing on of local culture, and other values that are difficult to quantify might be shaken. With the ideal of increasing self-sufficiency mixed with the complex realities of the situation on the ground, the agrarian reform plan was positioned as a turning point that carried both hope and perplexity.