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FEATURE: Japanese rice farmers explore new frontier in Asia with exports+
(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)MASUDA, Japan, March 22_(Kyodo) _ (EDS: THIS IS THE FIRST OF A THREE-PIECE FEATURE SERIES ON CHANGING AGRICULTURE IN JAPAN. FOUR PHOTOS ACCOMPANYING THIS STORY ARE AVAILABLE VIA E-MAIL. THE PHOTO ADVISORY IS TO FOLLOW.)
Images of a castle, cherry blossoms and traditional "egret dance" performers adorn a package made of Japanese paper, along with a label saying "yummy and healthy rice" grown in western Japan's Shimane Prefecture.
The product, milled and packaged at the JA Nishi Iwami agricultural cooperative, has found its way into two upscale department stores in Taiwan, where people buy high-quality food items as gifts.
"We are trying to emphasize the high-class image of our rice, so we made the elaborate package," said Tsuyoshi Mitarai, director general of JA Nishi Iwami's Agricultural Department.
Locally certified farmers grew the "healthy rice" using limited amounts of pesticide and chemical fertilizer.
Egret dance, a type of folk dance performed every summer in the Shimane area, is designated as one of Japan's significant intangible folk cultural assets.
Since Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization in January 2002, foreign rice producers have seen market access opportunities to the region expand.
Akihiro Higashino, a Japanese farm ministry official who formerly worked at the Interchange Association in Taipei, Japan's de facto embassy in Taiwan, said he has urged the JA and Shimane prefectural officials to export their rice because Niigata rice imported to the region earlier was popular.
JA Nishi Iwami has shipped 10 to 15 tons of rice annually to Taiwan since October 2003, for sale at the Breeze Center in Taipei and Isetan outlet in Kaohsiung.
"When we first conducted sales campaigns, 500 packages of rice, or 1 ton, sold out in less than three days," Mitarai said. "Then sales staff at the Taipei store got serious."
The store sold the Shimane rice in special gift packages during this lunar New Year holidays, he said.
Even though one package carries a price tag of NT$420-450, or about 1,500-1,600 yen, six times the price of the cheapest rice sold in the stores, wealthy consumers do not mind.
"We will never cut the price because we want to maintain the rice's brand value," he said.
"We explain how safe our rice is, but consumers seem to buy the product because of its good taste," Mitarai said. He added that sales of Shimane rice now amount to 30 percent of the Breeze Center's total rice sales.
"With the product becoming popular in Taiwan, rice farmers in Shimane have become more confident in themselves and have expanded their rice production," Mitarai said.
According to the JA official, the real objective of the export drive is to heighten the rice's brand power and boost sales of it in Japan, because the amount exported is small and little profit is expected from the project.
JA Nishi Iwami plans to start rice sales at Taichung and increase the export of other items as well, such as pickled "wasabi," or Japanese horseradish, and fruit, to Taiwan, he said.
The story of the Shimane farmers is encouraging to other producers in Japan trying to sell their food items overseas under the government's initiative to double Japan's food exports to about 600 billion yen in 2009 from 331.1 billion yen in 2005.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is spearheading the export drive aimed at enhancing the Japanese farm sector's competitiveness with the slogan "aggressive agriculture." The government has heavily protected the agricultural sector.
The government started to promote Japanese food exports in earnest in April 2004, with the budget for the campaign increased from about 50 million yen per year up to fiscal 2003 to 1.2 billion yen in fiscal 2006. Agricultural exports in 2005 grew 12.1 percent from the previous year.
The Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives, or the umbrella organization also known as JA-Zenchu, has exported rice produced by its members across Japan under the single brand name of "JA rice" since October 2004.
About 120 tons of JA rice, including items from Niigata, Yamagata and Akita, known as major production sites, was exported to Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong as of December 2005.
"Even though long-grain rice is consumed in those markets, except for Taiwan, some people try samples of short-grain Japanese rice and buy the Japanese product on impulse," said Jun Yaguchi, a JA-Zenchu official.
The entity's products, including rice that needs no washing before being cooked, are targeted at wealthy people and sold at high-end department stores. In Thailand, JA rice is 10 times more expensive than the cheapest product sold locally, Yaguchi said.
Cashing in on the Japanese diet boom, the organization has hosted cooking classes for Singaporeans to teach how to make sushi with Japanese rice, he added.
JA-Zenchu hopes to eventually sell rice produced by its members in the populous mainland Chinese market, but Beijing has yet to allow imports from Japan, saying quarantine problems remain, according to the official.
The food export campaign appears to shed a ray of light on Japanese rice producers who face dead-end situations with the aging of farmers, decline in domestic rice consumption and a possibly imminent increase in rice imports to Japan depending on the outcome of current global trade negotiations.
However, critics point out that the export drive is not a panacea. The prices of exported Japanese rice have fallen in some places due to competition between products shipped from different parts of Japan.
Referring to the fact that Japan's food exports are insignificant compared to its food imports, which stood at about 7 trillion yen in 2004, a former agricultural ministry official said Japan should focus on measures to dramatically improve production efficiency among farmers so their products can better compete with foreign imports.
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