Japanese Rice Policy Pros And Cons

Japan is located in Eastern Asia, an island chained between the North Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Japan, right off the east of the Korean peninsula (World Fact Book). Japan was once closed off from the world but opened its ports for trade after signing the Treaty of Kanagawa with the US in 1854 and began to move towards modernize and industrialize. Despite its detachment from the rest of the world, Japan still has the issues that most other countries have and that’s food security. Japan’s economy is slowly coming back after the major earthquake and the tsunami that came with it that happened in March of 2011, where the northeast of Honshu Island was wrecked, thousands of people were killed, and several nuclear power plants were damaged. This catastrophe crippled Japan’s …show more content…
The removal of several government programs would actually be more helpful than harmful. Japanese rice policy has no features that increase the consistency of the food supply nor does it stabilize the food supply in the country (Williams). There also hasn’t been an increase of Japanese consumers to the supply of rice. Because the policy has raised the price way above world market levels, it reduces consumers buying power. In addition to that, there’s also the available supply of rice that is less accessible to Japanese consumers (Williams). Japan’s rice policy was made to help as a self-sufficiency measure but in contrast it limits domestic rice production and diminishes the accessibility of consumers. There were other way Japan could have use the rice policy but it mostly shows that the government mainly wanted to support prices and incomes in the agricultural sector (Williams). While Japanese rice policy may be one of the reason why there’s a cut in food security it does show that they knew that the domestic agriculture sector needed to be developed and supported so it wouldn’t decrease