1) The rice surplus problem has emerged seriously since 1969 in Japan. In the confrontation with rice surplus, government has been conducting programs for production adjustment to balance the demand and supply of rice. Today's production control program called “The Paddy Field Reorientation Program” has started in 1978, which promote conversion from paddy to other crop production, such as wheat, barley, soybean, and forage crops.
2) Owing to the program, rice production has decreased rapidly but the other grains increased steadily. Nevertheless area of cultivated land, both paddy and upland field, has decreased continually, total domestic production of field crops has not decreased but stagnated. However, expansion of livestock industry in response to the increasing livestock products consumption has required increasing imports of feed grains. As a result, self-sufficiency rate of edible farm products has been decreasing in Japan. Furthermore, agricultural income decreased because physical expenditure has increased under the situation of stagnating gross agricultural output.
3) Under the condition of decreasing farm income in farm household, livestock raising such as layers, hogs, beef cattle, dairy cattle, differentiation of farms as well as technological progress has been proceeding rapidly. Consequently, the share of large scale livestock raising farmers in gross output has become very large. On the other hand, household economy of rice farmers is supported mainly by non-farm income. Programs for concentrating cultivated land of part-time and small scale farmers to the large scale farmers has not been proceeded so rapidly. Therefore, a large proportion of rice production is undertaken by class Ⅱ type of part-time farmers(farm household earned main income from other jobs).
4) It is very important to expand management area and to change from rice single cropping to rotation cropping. In the light of this crucial target, it is necessary to be created a social framework for collective land use system by farmers themselves.
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