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Comment by mkesper | Hacker News Reader

Q: It's said that the decline in rice consumption is serious, but if the amount produced increased and the price went down, people would eat more, wouldn't they?

A: Exactly. Rice acreage reduction is an absolutely terrible policy. The government spends over 300 billion yen (about $2.06 billion) in subsidies annually to decrease the amount of rice produced, thus going out of its way to raise the price and increasing the burden on consumers.

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To be fair, that's a common practice even when it comes to non edible products (for example, coming from a petrol producing country, I grew up hearing every now and then about OPEC having decided to reduce petrol production to raise prices)

Yes but per the article, this policy has been active for 60 years. They're not temporarily buoying after a seasonal surplus, they're just paying farmers not to farm ..... for generations.

The USA has been doing that since the 1970's as land preservation.

It also props up the price of various goods to keep them profitable to produce so farms don't go under by limiting the amount produced to avoid big gluts of produce.

That’s a great point. Reminds me of how currently in the Willamette valley of Oregon, grass seed prices are terrible because there’s oversupply such that growers can’t even sell last years crop at a profit, resulting in more oversupply.

Some ground isn’t suitable for much else than annual ryegrass, which does well on the clay mud in the hills and seasonal bogs. There’s not much to switch to that can even handle the conditions.

Other grass crops like different types of fescue are a multi year investments since the first year you don’t get much from the field and it takes time to clean up the weed seeds. So flipping to another crop puts you in a big hole.

Finally there’s the generally six figure equipment to harvest any particular crop. A given harvester can only deal with a very limited selection of crops, and even then is often going to require configuration and tuning when switching to a compatible crop.

I think the grape and hop guys might also be seeing something similar, but I’m not entirely sure.

I can imagine that growers with fields configured for growing rice face similar issues. If price tanks, they don’t have the flexibility to “just” pivot to something else as needed.

That's why we have subsidies.

One of many. Another is to just directly bribe farmers for political support in areas of the country given extra power by the structure of the US government where not every vote gets equal weight.

Which is dumb. Land should just be purchased for conservation (or other arrangements like easements with transfer on sale) to the government or private land conservatory groups. Endless subsidy is corrupt.

Japan is an island, which can be blockaded, so they’ve always tried to help their farmers. Usually they pay the farmers to grow less, not pay them to grow nothing. Also this policy was phased out in 2018; now they’re just subsidizing farmers and encouraging crop diversity. I think they’re doing a good job. Being a farmer is always hard. In Japan at least they’re making it easier. Encouraging crop diversity and organic farming is nice (especially compared to the us corn/soy situation).

Depleting the land in that manner is what caused the Dust Bowl. May sound dumb, but it is certainly not.

The difference is that OPEC countries colluding to raise prices hurt other countries, not their own people (they generally subsidise petrol for their own citizens), whereas Japan's policy of artificially raising the price of Japanese rice hurts Japanese consumers, and Japanese consumers vastly outnumber Japanese farmers.

> Japanese consumers vastly outnumber Japanese farmers

Japan is also a parliamentary system, and a significant portion of Single Member Seats in the House of Representatives are small towns or rural [0]

Pissed off farmers caused the LDP to lose power in the 2009 election [1], which is historic in a country that is a de facto one-party state.

The LDP in 2024 is looking similarly weak like the LDP in 2009 so they cannot afford to anger the farming bloc.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_of_the_Hou...

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Japanese_general_electi...

OPEC do that to raise export prices. Quite often they have subsidized or really lightly taxed petrol for domestic use.

Are people moving to other crops that aren’t as water intensive with all the global warming and erratic weather patterns that are developing around the world? Looks like from the article there isn’t a significant decrease in rice production and “tourism” could only affect 0.5% so could it be artificial inflation like in the USA from limited competition that’s been going on the past few years?

There is no water shortage on a small island like Japan, it gets a LOT of rain, and really, when grown in the mountain areas (cmmon in Japan) the rice terraces probably slow the water flow down rather than speed it up (going via the river straight into the sea) somewhat watering the rice crops and all other life nearby.

Rice doesn't actually need a lot of water to grow, they use the water as a type of weed control, rice is unique in that it can grow practically submersed in water. Most other species cannot.

Bali has been experimenting growing rice without such large amounts of water, it went well. Google it!

Global warming, climate change is shifting weather patterns. While west coasts (California, the UK, Spain) are generally getting less rain, East coasts (Japan, Newfoundland, Florida) are generally getting hit with more rain and more storms.

The UK is actually getting more and more rain because evaporation over the Atlantic increases with warming (I suppose same phenomenon as for Japan)... at least as long as the Gulf Stream keeps flowing.

Actually, global warming is making Japan get more rain.

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