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The story
This year’s provisional price (advance payment) for new rice has fallen 40% from last year, with JA now buying it at 266 yen per kilogram. The original article quotes the view that “farmers’ disappointment is beyond imagination,” and cites a rise in farmers leaving the industry as the biggest concern.
In the thread, opinions split over the cause and who’s to blame: some slammed JA as a middleman skimming profits, others pointed out that more farmers selling outside JA is behind the recent price swings, and some predicted next year will bring a shift toward growing rice for animal feed instead.
lol they’re skimming off about half of it
This year’s provisional rice price falls 40%… “Farmers’ disappointment is beyond imagination” — the biggest worry is that it will drive farmers out of the industry
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
It's insane that everything gets dumped on JA, which is nothing more than a farmers' co-op.
The government should buy rice from farmers at 1,000 yen/kg
and sell it to consumers at 500 yen.
That's literally how it used to work.
It's an organization that exists to funnel political donations to the LDP.
And to give retired bureaucrats a soft landing (amakudari).
If it were actually a government body, it couldn't make political donations, and if its staff were civil servants there'd be no amakudari and no huge executive salaries to hand out.
NHK is the same kind of amakudari vehicle.
2025: 5kg for 5,000 yen
Farmers: "If it drops any further we can't survive!" Consumers: (…what is this guy even saying)
What farmers should really be saying is "If middlemen and JA keep lowballing us any further, we can't survive."
If they can sell without a middleman, they should just do that.
Some farmers do build their own sales channels.
But JA pays out money upfront based on the projected harvest and compensates farmers even in a bad year — with JA, farmers really can just focus on growing rice.
If you're willing to shoulder all the risk yourself, go ahead and sell independently.
The government was bleeding money and couldn't make it work, so it all got dumped on JA.
JA was handling it fine, but once the market recently opened up to buyers outside JA too, we ended up with what happened last year.
There's no country where agriculture is hugely profitable.
Every country pours a massive national budget into it.
And within that group, Japan actually spends among the least.
https://assets.st-note.com/img/1737329690-dovAiwYuZaNnTMR3Uzre9CtL.png
Exactly this.
In the end, the government is abandoning its duty to protect the nation's food supply just because it would run a deficit.
The population and the scale are totally different though.
It's true that subsidies get paid out for growing feed rice.
The government is basically engineering a setup where that's more profitable than growing rice for human consumption.
When rice prices drop, growing subsidized feed rice actually brings in more income.
So it's pretty much certain more farmers will switch to feed rice next year.
Is there an actual quality difference between feed rice and human-grade rice?
Or is it more that the cost is very different?
If it's the latter, couldn't the government just buy up all the surplus human-grade old rice and cut back on feed-rice purchases instead?
And didn't they say they'd buy back the released stockpile rice too?
Isn't that also "old old rice" (koko-mai, rice that's been in storage multiple years)?
They use the tall-stalked variety because it gets turned into silage.
There are dedicated feed-rice varieties — they yield more rice, but in exchange the taste is nowhere near something a human could actually eat.
That's exactly the kind of thing you should just leave to market forces.
Let JA and "non-JA" buyers fight it out, and whoever wins survives.
JA is an organization that doesn't prioritize profit — if it goes under, consumers are the ones who lose out.
"Non-JA" = foreign capital, you know.
That's exactly what caused the price spikes these past few years.
JA got outbid and ended up securing only 40% of the stock it needed.
If it doesn't care about profit, it shouldn't go under — it's a co-op, isn't it?
JA is really a financial company that makes its money from banking — on farm products it only makes enough to avoid running a loss.
It's a farmers' co-op, so if the farmers go under, it's over.
And if its shares get bought up, it's also over.
Then why do farmers sell to that foreign capital in the first place?
Because it wouldn't actually hurt them if JA went under, right?
They want cash right now.
Or they're backed into such a corner they can't survive without immediate cash.
Rice farming runs at a loss almost every single year.
Most of them are part-timers just trying to preserve land handed down from their ancestors.
The biggest cautionary tale of handing your food supply to foreign capital is Ukraine's Holodomor.
During the Soviet era, Ukrainians were the ones who starved to death in the greatest numbers.
The reason so many farmers sell outside JA is that they get cash on the spot, and JA's grading standards are so strict that shipping through JA significantly cuts your income.
To put it simply: a sorting machine separates rice by sieve size into normal-sized rice and slightly smaller rice called "kuzu-mai" (substandard rice). Non-JA buyers will take the slightly-smaller rice at the same price as normal rice — JA won't.
Take a lesson from his father, Junichiro Koizumi, who privatized the postal service.
That's exactly why breaking up JA would drive rice and vegetable prices up, and it's consumers who'd suffer.
JA is the one that's been buying crops from farmers at rock-bottom prices and squeezing them all along.
I honestly don't get why ordinary people are out here bashing JA.
As things stand, it's unworkable in all sorts of ways.
Tax money already flows in through JA in various forms.
It just gets skimmed off along that route too.
There are way too many systems that exist mainly to generate political donations to the LDP and fat paychecks for amakudari bureaucrats — pretty much all of them work that way.
And the source of that money is taxes.
Infrastructure, agriculture, public safety, and national defense don't turn a profit.
That's exactly why government money has to go into them.
But the current government worships market fundamentalism, so it completely ignores all of that.
Just crush the surplus with a tractor like they do with an overabundant lettuce or cabbage harvest.
Or grit your teeth, sell it cheap, and clear out the inventory.
Farmers don't even hold inventory to begin with — buyers just show up and purchase all of it.
Unlike lettuce or cabbage, rice and wheat get special legal treatment, and there's an actual system in place for the government to buy them up.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s rice market isn’t a free market in the ordinary sense. Until 1995, the government ran the Food Control System (shokuryo kanri seido), buying nearly all domestic rice at fixed prices and reselling it — the exact “buy high, sell low” scheme poster #8 nostalgically describes. When that system was dismantled for running unsustainable deficits, JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, an interlocking network of farm co-ops that also runs banking and insurance) inherited the role of aggregating, financing, and marketing the crop, paying farmers a provisional price up front against the harvest and settling later. That “provisional price” — this year 266 yen/kg, down 40% — is the number at the center of the thread.
The thread doesn’t actually split over whether farmers are being squeezed; everyone agrees they are. It splits over who’s squeezing them: JA as a self-interested middleman fattening its banking arm off agricultural sidelines, versus the newer channel of non-JA (including foreign-capital) buyers whose competition for stock is blamed for last year’s shortage and this year’s price collapse.
What’s likely to be missed is that JA’s profit margin on rice itself is thin by design — its real income comes from finance and insurance, not crop trading — and that farmers who bypass JA do so mainly for immediate cash and looser grading rules, not because JA is uniquely predatory. Also absent from the thread: the government’s separate stockpile-release and feed-rice subsidy programs are policy levers actively reshaping these prices, not neutral market outcomes.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “JA Buys New Rice at 266 Yen per Kilogram, Then Says “Farmers’ Disappointment Is Beyond Imagination”.”
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