Japanese farmer Kiyoharu Hirao has begun adding rice to the mix he gives his cattle so that he can stretch his money further as a plunging yen drives up the cost of imported corn used in animal feed.
That makes him worried about the quality of his prized wagyu beef and, along with other farmers facing similar hardship across the country, angry at the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that once held an almost unshakable grip on rural Japan.
“I don’t know how much more people can take, myself included, since the price of feed and other products keeps going up,” the 73-year-old Hirao said at his farm on the outskirts of Yamagata city, strains of classical music rising from speakers inside his barn.
For years, Hirao has used music to calm the cows and ensure tender beef. Now he fears the rice could harm their gut bacteria.
The yen’s slide to a more than two-decade low this year has hit Japan’s farmers hard, making the already high cost of imported feed, fuel and fertilizer even more difficult to afford. Some, like Hirao, are cutting costs or taking loans. Some are talking of giving up farming altogether.
The situation has added to the quiet discontent in Hirao’s prefecture of Yamagata, about 400km north of Tokyo, a primarily agricultural region known for its rice, beef and cherries.
Reuters spoke with two dozen farmers, officials and policy experts across Japan, including a dozen farmers in Yamagata, at least 10 of whom described discontent there or in other agricultural regions, exposing fissures in the LDP’s rural base.
Polls show that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is expected to lead the LDP to victory in an upper house election on July 10, but the combined effects of inflation and the weaker yen could cost him critical rural votes and weaken his grip on the fractious party.
Once a solid LDP supporter, Hirao said he started to drift from the party because he felt it did not do enough for farmers. His opposition hardened under former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who advocated for free trade and unleashed monetary stimulus in an attempt to end deflation and boost wages.
In the coming election, he said he is leaning more towards the incumbent candidate, who is from the opposition.
Prices are rising, but wages have not budged in decades. Japan’s central bank, run by an Abe appointee, has stuck to ultra-low interest rates even though raising rates tends to increase the value of a country’s currency.
“It’s just low interest rates and more low interest rates and somehow we get by, but eventually the younger generations get stuck with the burden,” Hirao said. “I hate all the people Abe appointed. None of them are any good.”
FEELING BETRAYED
About 1.3 million people, less than 2 percent of the labor force, work primarily in agriculture in Japan. Yet farmers are a potent political force because the electoral system disproportionately favors rural voters, and because agriculture cooperatives, collectively known as the JA Group, form a powerful lobby.
Some farmers in Yamagata said they feel betrayed by the LDP because it picked free trade over farmers in the past decade, paring back support measures and opening the Japanese market up more to foreign competition.
They want to return to the days of strong government support and a more protectionist stance, which were pillars of LDP policy for decades, but have been partly dismantled.
To win back such disaffected rural voters, the LDP must deliver more for farmers, said Kazuhito Yamashita, a former agriculture ministry bureaucrat and now research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies think tank.
“As prices of fertilizer, pesticides and fuel increase, farmers will earn less and grow increasingly dissatisfied. Their support for the LDP will gradually weaken,” he said. “The LDP doesn’t want to make an enemy of the farm lobby, so in terms of elections, they will have no choice but to back policies the farm lobby wants.”
A spokesperson for the LDP did not directly address the party’s support among farmers, but said the LDP was striving to ensure all citizens understand its policies, not only those involved in agriculture.
The spokesperson said that the party’s election platform includes a pledge to ease the effects of higher fuel, feed and fertilizer prices, without providing further details.
“The surge in energy and commodity prices are a worry,” Toshiaki Endo, chair of the LDP’s election strategy committee and a lower-house representative from Yamagata, told party supporters in April. “We’re in for an extremely tough fight.”
Public support for Kishida has fallen to a four-month low of 48.7 percent, and more than 54 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation, a Jiji Press poll showed this month.
Abe’s embrace of a landmark trans-Pacific trade deal in 2013, which Japan formally signed five years later, damaged LDP support in the rice-growing north, farmers and analysts said.
Yamagata is one of a handful of prefectures that does not have LDP lawmakers in the upper house, although all three of its representatives in the lower house are from the party.
“Farmers and agriculture groups were traditionally strong supporters of the ruling party, but over the past 10 years, there are more people who think it’s not good to rely only on the LDP,” said Toshihiro Ooyama, a 12th generation farmer who heads the agricultural cooperative in Yamagata city.
The cooperatives lobby on behalf of their members and invest farmers’ savings through the Norinchukin Bank, which has US$756 billion in assets and is a major player in global financial markets.
JA Group declined to comment on farmers’ support for the LDP. It said that rising costs of fuel, raw materials and animal feed were causing “widening concern” among agricultural producers.
It said its policy proposal last month calls for measures to ease the strain on farmers, including government support to expand domestic production of crops used for feed.
THREAT TO SURVIVAL
Japan has reduced support for agriculture in the past few decades, but even so, 41 percent of farmers’ revenue comes from government subsidies, more than double the average of most wealthy nations.
Japanese farmers charged 60 percent more than international market levels for their produce from 2018 to 2020, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said.
Some economists said that aging Japan can no longer afford to give big support to farmers. Yet without that support, the LDP could lose its grip on a key group of voters.
“The LDP will just hit a wall” in Yamagata if it does not extend more help to farmers, 57-year-old Kazuharu Igarashi said.
At his hog shed in Tsuruoka, near the Sea of Japan, he also adds rice to animal feed and is concerned that his pork could be drier. So far, he said customers have not noticed. About 80 percent of his monthly revenue of ￥10 million (US$75,000) goes toward animal feed, above his break-even of about 60 percent.
Igarashi said he took a loan from a prefectural emergency fund, but is concerned that other farmers might not survive financially.
Like Hirao, he said he is leaning toward voting for the incumbent candidate, Yasue Funayama of the centrist Democratic Party for the People. A former farm ministry bureaucrat, she favors European-style guaranteed minimum incomes for rice farmers.
“The government says rice is at the heart of our culture and the people’s staple food, but production has been liberalized,” Funayama said from her office in Tokyo. “The government has abandoned its greatest responsibility.”
Given Funayama’s popularity, the LDP considered not fielding a candidate, a person familiar with the party’s thinking said.
However, the party named a candidate about six weeks before the July 10 vote.
To be sure, there can be many issues that affect how farmers vote, especially as 70 percent are aged 65 or older.
“There is such a wide variation among the farming population,” said Kay Shimizu, a research assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored a book about Japanese farming and the JA cooperatives. “On the one hand, they have an interest in their well-being, in their livelihood, which is farming, but they also have other interests. Many of them are a lot older, they have social welfare concerns.”
Kazuyuki Oshino, a rice farmer in central Yamagata, said he was asked by three farmers to take over managing their paddies because of rising costs.
“If conditions continue as they are, things will be hard,” he said. “So they quit.”
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