Japan's aging farmers key to major malaise

SHONAI, Japan — This broad coastal plain near the Sea of Japan, blessed with abundant water and rich soil and checkered with rice paddies hued golden yellow in the early spring, is one of the country's most fertile granaries. But there is an unmistakable malaise here.

The farmers who work the paddies are graying and dwindling in number. Abandoned, overgrown plots are a common sight. Because of how small their farms are and how far rice prices have fallen, many farmers find it impossible to make ends meet.

"Japanese agriculture has no money, no youth, no future," said one farmer, Hitoshi Suzuki, 57, who stood on his 450-year-old family farm as an icy wind blew from the sea.

The troubles on the farm are emblematic of an overall feeling of paralysis gripping Japan. Faced with mounting challenges from an aging population and chronic low growth, the nation has tried to preserve the status quo, in essence by burning through its vast accumulated wealth, rather than make tough changes, say economists.

"Japan's rural crisis offers a glimpse of the entire nation's future," said Yasunari Ueno, a Tokyo economist.

In Shonai, farmland prices have dropped as much as 70 percent in the past 15 years, and the number of farmers has shrunk by half since 1990.

Across Japan, production of rice, the traditional staple grain, is down 20 percent in a decade, raising alarms in a nation that now imports 61 percent of its food, says Japan's Statistics Bureau.

Aging is seen as the biggest problem in rural areas, where 70 percent of Japan's 3 million farmers are 60 or older.

While the current global financial crisis has added to the grimness, the root causes lie in Japan's rural economic system of tiny, woefully inefficient family farms, which dates to the end of World War II. But while many farmers and agriculture experts agree that this system is breaking down, change has been blocked by an array of vested interests and a fear of disturbing established ways.

"Agriculture could resuscitate local economies, if it were made healthy again," said Masayoshi Honma, a professor of agriculture at the University of Tokyo. "Without reform, it will just decline to death."