June 3, 2025

Grilled by Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Koike Akira, Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru acknowledged the need to increase government spending on agriculture at a House of Councilors Budget Committee meeting on June 2.

Koike pointed out that private stocks of rice decreased from the previous year’s level for three years in a row and that the private-sector stockpile at the end of June 2024 dropped to 1.53 million tons, below the optimal range of 1.8-2 million tons.

Koike said that the ongoing rice shortage occurred because the successive Liberal Democratic Party governments under their agricultural policy forced farmers to reduce rice paddy acreage and rice production on the grounds of the declining domestic demand for rice. They also abolished the farm income compensation system, left the rice price dependent on market demand which weakened the agricultural production base, and imported 770,000 tons of tariff-free rice, the so-called “minimum access rice”, annually for 20 years, while imposing production cuts on farmers.

Koike called for an end to such a policy and stressed that what the government should do is to implement measures to guarantee the producer’s price and compensate farm incomes so that farmers can engage in farming without undue financial anxieties.

The JCP secretariat head pointed out that in contrast to Japan, which slashed its farming budget by about one-third between fiscal 1980 and fiscal 2025, the EU and the U.S. increased that budget by 4.6 times and by 7.5 times, respectively, during the same period. Stating, “To support the domestic production of rice, the staple of the Japanese diet, is to ensure Japan’s national security,” he demanded a drastic increase in government spending on agriculture.