Agriculture Minister Suzuki, who had previously said he wouldn’t intervene in rice prices, has reversed course and announced he wants to buy back government reserve rice before this year’s rice harvest begins. Even with experts pointing to a rice glut, the move reveals his real intention: he doesn’t want rice prices to fall. On 5ch, the discussion ranged widely — some suspect he’s prioritizing protecting farmers back home in Yamagata, others raised the vested-interest ties with JA (the national agricultural cooperative), and still others compared the price of imported rice.
Farm Minister Suzuki, who was supposed to “not intervene in rice prices,” declares he “wants to buy back reserve rice before the harvest starts”… his real intention despite a rare rice glut: he “absolutely does not want rice prices to fall”
8/28 (Fri) 6:02 AM JST
Daily Shincho
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
Sanae Takaichi, hold a press conference already!!
Why is rice cheaper overseas than in Japan?
Isn't it just that Japanese farmers are incompetent?
With the weak yen, labor costs are cheap here too, so Japan should be able to produce it cheaper than other countries, right?
Isn't it strange to demand profits when your production capacity is this low?
If you want more money, shouldn't you just work harder?
Aren't the farmers the ones most at fault here?
Japan should drop the rice tariff to zero and make them compete on price with foreign rice.
Isn't the real problem that vested-interest groups like JA — not the farmers — were the ones hiding rice in warehouses?
They were probably betting on another bad harvest in 2025 too.
By the way, rice is cheap overseas because the paddies are large and easy to mechanize.
In Japan, lots of farmers each own tiny paddies, which makes mechanization hard.
They don't reduce the number of farmers because keeping them around helps the ruling party at election time.
If you weaken the yen further, fertilizer, feed, electricity, and machine fuel costs all go up across the board, you know?
And on top of that, you people keep demanding the minimum wage be raised to 1,500 or 2,000 yen.
Even imports, which start out cheap, get pricier with a weak yen — so domestic goods go up too.
That'd be vested interests, obviously.
Well, obviously.
Votes too, probably.
That's why the number of farmers-in-name-only never shrinks (people who barely farm but keep the title for subsidies and votes).
an utterly incompetent Farm Minister.
He can't even follow the one instruction Takaichi gave him. Useless.
You should be directing that at Yamagata Prefecture (his home turf).
This will show how serious Takaichi really is.
If Suzuki stays on as Farm Minister, it's all just for show.
If he gets replaced, she means business.
The 'result' is already in: the public is saying, 'If our income isn't rising but rice prices are, we'll just eat something other than rice.'
They must be out of their minds to think they can keep prices high and still sell all of it.
I think if you raise the price of everything except rice, rice's relative price stays in check.
Then let's raise the government's resale price on imported wheat too, and kill off udon while we're at it.
The public's already weaned itself off rice anyway.
So as not to waste tax money:
I'll allow it if they buy back the reserve rice at under 1,000 yen per kilogram.
Anything above that,
make Suzuki's salary and the Agriculture Ministry bureaucrats
split the bill for the wasted tax money.
1,000 yen per kilo works out to 5,000 yen for 5 kilos — that's buying back reserve rice at a higher price than even last year's peak.
They bought it up to drive prices higher, made a killing, then resold reserve rice — which cost them next to nothing — at inflated prices for another killing. And now this on top of it? Come on.
Well, economic freedom is a protected right, after all.
Agriculture-bloc politicians actually win votes
by openly showing off that they're steering benefits their constituents' way —
that's the whole pitch to their base.
If rice prices rise,
people will either eat something other than rice or turn to imported rice.
(And sure enough, imports did increase.)
Foreign rice spreads to dining tables and restaurants — imports up 50-fold since the rice crisis, casting a shadow over food security
Fragmented farmland stands in the way (part 2)
August 21, 2026, 5:00 AM [Subscriber-only article]
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUA217U70R20C26A7000000/
They say it's 'spreading to restaurants,' but almost no major dining chains actually disclose that they use imported rice.
Imported rice had its moment when it was cheap, but everyone's gone back to domestic rice now that prices have come back down.
With domestic rice already under 3,000 yen and barely pricier than Calrose, would people even still pick imported?
"Amid rising prices and shortages, in 2025 the major supermarket chain Aeon initially stocked California-grown 'Calrose' rice at 2,680 yen (before tax) for 4 kg."
4 kg at 2,680 yen = 5 kg at 3,350 yen
So old imported rice is pricier than new domestic rice?
They're the ones who tried to make a killing at the public's expense, so it's their own fault — just leave them to it.
If the wholesalers are the ones refusing to buy the new crop except at rock-bottom prices, then just give the subsidies straight to the farmers.
Whatever happens, don't hand money to the wholesalers.
What's wrong with trying to turn a profit in a capitalist society??
They should've kept it in moderation.
Get too greedy and cross the line, and you get punished for it.
Price-gouging on a staple food is the kind of crime that'd land you in prison in other countries.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s government reserve rice system was created after the 1993 crop failure and street shortages, and normally works one way: the state releases stockpiled rice to calm prices during shortages, as it did during the 2024-25 rice-price crisis, then restocks afterward at market rates. What Suzuki is proposing — buying rice back before the new harvest even lands, while private stockpiles are reportedly around 2.43 million tons above normal — inverts that logic into a price floor. JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) is the body that actually collects, stores, and distributes most domestic rice and has long been treated as inseparable from LDP farm-bloc politics, especially in rural, over-represented districts like Suzuki’s home prefecture of Yamagata, one of Japan’s largest rice producers.
The thread doesn’t converge on one villain. Posts split between pinning the blame on farmers themselves (small, unmechanized paddies keeping costs high, unlike the large operations used overseas), on JA and wholesalers accused of hoarding reserve rice to resell at a markup, and on Suzuki/LDP simply protecting a voting bloc regardless of consumer cost. One post even defends the hoarders as exercising legitimate “economic freedom” in a capitalist system, which cuts against the thread’s dominant outrage.
What’s likely to be missed: land fragmentation — millions of small, non-contiguous paddies inherited across generations — is a structural, decades-old obstacle to consolidation and mechanization, separate from JA’s political leverage, yet both get flattened into a single “farm lobby” grievance. Also unmentioned is that this reversal contradicts Suzuki’s own earlier stated position against intervening in prices at all.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Farm Minister Suzuki, who was supposed to ‘not intervene in rice prices,’ says he wants to buy back reserve rice before the harvest starts… ‘I absolutely do not want rice prices to fall’ despite the glut.”
