YAMAGATA, Japan — Japanese farmer Kiyoharu Hirao has started to add more rice to the mix he gives his cattle in order to stretch his money further as a plunging yen drives up the cost of imported corn used in animal feed.
The situation has added to the quiet discontent in Mr. Hirao’s prefecture of Yamagata, a primarily agricultural region known for its rice, beef and cherries some 400 kilometers north of Tokyo. Prices are now rising but wages still 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.
To win back such disaffected rural voters, the LDP will be forced to 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. Public support for Mr. Kishida recently fell to a four-month low of 48.7% and more than 54% disapprove of his handling of inflation, a Jiji Press poll showed this month.Mr. Abe’s embrace of a landmark trans-Pacific trade deal in 2013, which Japan formally signed five years later, damaged the LDP’s support in the rice-growing north, farmers and analysts said.
Japan has reduced support for agriculture in recent decades, but even so, 41% of farmers’ revenue still comes from government subsidies, more than double the average of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development group of wealthy nations. Japanese farmers charged 60% more than international market levels for their produce in 2018 to 2020, according to the OECD.
Like Mr. Hirao, he said he is leaning in the coming election toward 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.
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