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The story
Miyata, chairman of Fukui Prefecture’s JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) group, has called on the national government to buy back government stockpiled rice and reconsider production controls in response to falling provisional rice prices. On 5ch, opinions split between letting market forces decide and using tax money to support farmers, with criticism of JA’s distribution system and even extreme calls to abandon domestic farming altogether in favor of imports.
Koichi Miyata, Chairman of Fukui JA
“The cost benchmark (¥20,535 per 60kg) needs to become the standard. The government needs to implement policies that guide prices toward that level.”
Following a sharp drop in provisional rice prices, Chairman Miyata of the prefectural JA group stressed the need for the government to buy back stockpiled rice and review production controls in order to resolve the rice glut.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article
What people said
Reiwa 7 (2025 harvest) rice coming out now is normal timing, but the Reiwa 6 (2024) and Reiwa 5 (2023) harvest rice is the stuff from when everyone was screaming "we're short, we're short!"
So basically, any rice on store shelves right now that isn't from the Reiwa 7 harvest is that stuff.
Farmers want to sell rice high.
So why doesn't the government just subsidize rice farmers with tax money? There's no need to sell rice at high prices.
If you leave it to the market, farmers will disappear.
This would be fine.
There are some things you shouldn't leave entirely to market forces.
This should take priority over those excessive gasoline subsidies.
Look at the world's major agricultural powers.
Small and mid-sized farms died out there long ago — it's all large-scale operations now.
Japan, meanwhile, is nothing but tiny farms, all thanks to generous government policy.
Maybe that was the whole point of driving up rice prices last year.
It's still suspicious that nobody's given a clear reason why rice prices spiked so much last year.
Just grow other crops that actually make money lol
There's no reason to be stuck on rice lol
There's plenty of good bread and noodles out there now, so consumers have gotten used to alternatives.
All that price-gouging pushed people who used to eat rice three meals a day down to just one or two.
At this point, unless someone actually gets made an example of, consumers aren't going to look twice at rice again.
The price goes up while it's being passed from one middleman to another, right?
If I could buy 6kg for ¥2,050, I'd buy it without a second thought.
JA just buys up the big sacks of unmilled rice straight from farmers in bulk and passes them along — that's it.
They don't mill it, they don't weigh and bag it by the kilo, and they won't do individual shipping.
If you told JA to actually do all that, it'd cost just as much in labor and materials.
The only way it'd actually work is if you brought your own sacks, paid for your own transport, drove up to the farm yourself, and bought the unmilled rice directly.
Exactly.
That's supposed to be JA's job in the first place.
Instead of looking out for consumers, they're right there jacking up prices along with everyone else.
Japanese rice isn't even that delicious to begin with.
You need a dedicated rice cooker for it.
Eating it spikes your blood sugar like crazy.
It kind of felt like waking up — I lost my attachment to rice.
So in the end, was JA just sitting on a warehouse full of last year's rice the whole time?
Not shipping it out when it was scarce, then having a mountain of old rice right before the new harvest season — that's just idiotic.
JA plus the wholesalers, basically.
New-harvest Akitakomachi (rice variety), ¥1,780
Fully switch over to imported crops.
There's no need to force yourself to eat domestic produce.
Imports get you the same stuff cheaper anyway.
This.
We don't need to grow domestic rice or vegetables anymore.
Just switch entirely to imports.
Most Japanese people feel this way.
Seriously.
No Japanese person would be inconvenienced if domestic farmers disappeared entirely.
If anything, they're a nuisance.
Unless you've got overwhelming military or economic power, other countries will see you as an easy mark and force you to pay through the nose for produce.
Or you end up sending people abroad as immigrants just to have fewer mouths to feed.
Last year's Fukui Koshihikari (rice variety) being dumped at ¥1,999
That's still pricey.
Knock it down another half off, bam!
No purchase limit and Koshihikari at this price — that's pretty cheap.
Limit's 2 per person, but you can buy it every day, so.
Wait, was Agriculture Minister Suzuki actually competent?
So let's just abolish the tariffs then.
Word's already out that long-grain rice is tasty.
You can cook it easily in a frying pan or microwave — so convenient…
Short-grain rice is a hassle.
That's only because domestic rice still exists as competition.
If imports were priced the same as domestic, people would just buy domestic, so importers have no choice but to sell cheap.
But once everything's imported, there's no reason left to sell cheap.
Importers would be free to charge whatever they want.
You'd just import cheaply from a different country instead, idiot.
No, that's the price the government pays to buy stockpile rice.
Yeah, rice really was half the price back in 2021.
This is scary cheap in its own way, honestly.
Wheat production is even smaller than rice's, you know.
Can you not even grasp the obvious fact that if everyone switches to eating bread, the price will just go up too?
Background and Key Points
Fukui’s JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) is not a government body but a nationwide network of farmer cooperatives that has, since the postwar era, effectively controlled rice collection, storage and wholesale distribution — which is why posters instinctively blame JA rather than the government when prices swing. The ¥20,535 figure Chairman Miyata cites is the officially calculated “production cost benchmark” (seisan hi), used as a policy reference point rather than an actual market price. The backdrop is the 2024–2025 “Reiwa rice shock”: a real shortage in summer 2024 sent prices soaring, prompting the agriculture ministry to release emergency stockpile rice; by 2025 a large new harvest plus that released stockpile created the opposite problem — an oversupply pushing provisional prices down, which is what triggered Miyata’s call to buy back stockpile rice and revisit the decades-old production-adjustment (gentan) system that limits planted acreage to keep prices propped up.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t stockpiles versus tariffs — it was whether price stability should come from the market or from taxpayer subsidy, with a smaller but vocal faction arguing Japan should abandon rice self-sufficiency altogether and rely on imports.
What’s easy to miss: Japan already runs steep tariffs (roughly 778%) and a WTO minimum-access import quota on rice, so “just import” isn’t a tariff-free hypothetical — it would require unwinding trade protections that keep domestic paddies economically viable. Also worth noting: several posters (e.g. #151/#171) themselves conflated retail shelf prices with the much lower price the government pays to buy back stockpile rice — a distinction the article’s headline figure depends on but the thread never fully sorted out.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread「Fukui JA Chairman: “The government needs to guide prices to ¥20,535 per 60kg” — Review also aims to prevent oversupply and resolve the rice glut」.
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