Crop a Disaster, Reluctant Japan to Import Rice : Agriculture: California’s 2,500 growers should benefit by $100 million. But this is not an end to ban, Tokyo emphasizes.

Japan, whose closed rice market has become a symbol of unfair trade, announced Thursday that it will open its doors for emergency imports amid the most disastrous crops in nearly 50 years.

Officials said this does not change Japan’s long-term ban on rice imports, a position immediately criticized by California’s rice industry. But the emergency action is likely to prove a onetime boon to California growers, who are saddled with surpluses that have depressed prices.

Japan’s action will boost payments to California’s 2,500 rice growers this year by more than $100 million and should increase revenues to the state’s overall industry by 20%, the California Rice Industry Assn. said.

In Japan, relentless rains, typhoons and an unusually cool summer have left acres of green and gold rice paddies yielding barren shoots or kernels rotted brown from excessive moisture.

With the total crop yield estimated to reach only 80% of normal, the government announced it will immediately import 200,000 tons of rice for processing into miso, rice cakes and other products.

Officials did not say how much table rice will be imported, but the figure could reach 1 million tons--10% of Japan’s annual needs--beginning next year. Supplies would be purchased from the United States, Australia, Thailand and other leading producers.

“This is a once-in-a-century extreme situation,” said Agricultural Minister Eijiro Hata. He added that the emergency import plan does not signal a softening of the government’s opposition to liberalizing the rice market.

California farmers, who produce nothing but the japonica short- and medium-grain rice that the Japanese eat, stand to be key suppliers. Although adverse weather conditions caused a statewide rice shortage in the last few years, the drought’s end and better yields have helped produce a bumper crop.

This year’s California harvest, now under way, is projected at 1.6 million metric tons, the second-highest since the early 1980s. One-third of that still needs a place to go, said Bill Huffman of the Farmers Rice Cooperative in Sacramento.

As many as 400,000 tons of rice--virtually all of it from California--could be imported from the United States. That would cause rice prices to climb for markets that consume the japonica rice, notably Asia, Hawaii and parts of California, especially the Bay Area, said Jack Kenward of the California Rice Growers Assn., a small cooperative.

“I don’t think it will double rice prices, but you go in a supermarket today and rice is half the price of dog food,” said the Rice Industry Assn.’s John Roberts. “You tell me: If the price doubled, would that be high?” The Japanese routinely pay at retail eight to 10 times world market prices for their rice, and the emergency action will boost total world rice trade by 8% to 9%, Roberts said, factors that will drive prices up everywhere.

The U.S. Rice Council said it will use aggressive marketing to ensure that much of the rice is purchased from U.S. farmers rather than Japanese trading houses, which have begun to invest in rice farms in the United States.

Japan imported rice until the late 1960s. Since then, it has established a virtual ban on all imports, arguing the policy is needed to maintain self-sufficiency in growing the nation’s most important staple crop.

In 1984, another shortage forced Japan to import 150,000 tons of rice from South Korea, but the Japanese did so under a “reciprocal purchase agreement” rather than call it a strict import.

The emergency import announcement sparked renewed debate in both countries over Japan’s closed-door policy, with some arguing that the shortfall proves that the nation cannot depend merely on itself to maintain needed rice supplies.

But opening its market only in times of need and slamming it shut otherwise would irritate and alienate other countries, noted officials in both the United States and Japan.

“It’s a lot like having your cake and eating it too,” said Kenward. “We don’t feel that in the long term that is an appropriate position for the Japanese government to take.”

Kyuchi Akitani, a leading policy strategist for Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, said the “Japanese have got to get rid of their close-minded, island mentality and proceed with painful reform.”

But in the Hosokawa-led coalition government, at least three of the seven parties--the Socialists, New Party Harbinger and the Democrat Socialist Party--remain opposed to trade liberalization. Hosokawa’s New Japan Party, the Japan Renewal Party and the Buddhist-backed Clean Government have indicated more flexible positions.

The national Food Control Law, which allows the government to control rice prices and the acreage amount farmers may plant, also came under criticism.

In recent years, the government has instructed farmers to steadily reduce their rice acreage, as surpluses have mounted amid changing eating habits of less rice and more bread. Farmers were particularly irked that the shortage occurred after being told to reduce their plantings.

Across Japan, dumbfounded farmers sadly crumpled barren shoots in their hands as they wondered aloud how they will make ends meet during the upcoming winter. The prolonged recession has limited job opportunities for farmers, many of whom migrate to urban centers during winter for work.

“The company I usually work for (in the winter) hasn’t contacted me,” said one gloomy farmer in the northern Japan area of Tohoku. “I couldn’t harvest rice, so we can’t survive.”

Shaken by the looming rice crisis, Japanese consumers scrambled to snap up rice, leaving store shelves empty throughout the northern region. Officials forecast that already stiff prices will probably rise further.

The crisis has even produced rice thieves. In the Tokyo suburb of Chiba, three men were arrested Thursday for stealing 30 bags of brown rice worth $3,700 from a warehouse in the middle of the night. Explained one of the suspects: “I thought rice would be a moneymaker today.”

Watanabe reported from Tokyo and Woutat from Sacramento.