CCTV9英语新闻12月：日本的水稻农场改革

By CCTV correspondent Mike Firn

Japan is trying to make its farms more efficient as it tries to form tariff-free zones with its global trading partners. That may lead to big changes for the country's most protected workers, rice farmers.

Rice is a symbol of Japan's inefficiency¹, due to a government policy that pays over a million farmers to leave a third of their fields empty. The system has cost taxpayers² 40 billion dollars since 1970, and makes Japanese rice more than twice as expensive as that grown in China.

"Rice policy has a very long history. First Japan relied on rice a lot and we need rice production so government encourages farmers to produce lots more rice. But we started to eat bread and other food then rice consumption started to decline then the original policy of the government became failure so supply of rice became too much," Naoyuki Yoshino, economics professor at Keio University, says.

So much so that the government says Japan will have a surplus of 2.6 million tons by next June, the highest in 15 years.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he wants small farmers to lease fields to collectives who can grow rice more cheaply with economies of scale and modern equipment. To encourage the move the government is phasing out some subsidies³ by 2016, a move that's been heralded⁴ by the media as the end of the four decade old system, known as "gentan".

But one former Agriculture Ministry⁵ Official says the government announcement is just smoke and mirrors. He says the government is only ending subsidies announced a few years ago by the Democratic Party government and not those introduced 40 years ago by the LDP.

"The bureaucrats⁶ in the Ministry of Agriculture and the Diet members of the LDP who are experts are all consistent in insisting they will never abolish the gentan program and they will never lower the price of rice," Kazuhito Yamashita, Research Director of Canon Institute for Global Studies, says.

And if Japan is not prepared to cut rice prices, the government will continue to face pressure from farmers who want to be protected from cheap imports with duties on foreign rice that run as high as 778%.

 

 

1 inefficiency   

n.无效率，无能；无效率事例

参考例句：

• Conflict between management and workers makes for inefficiency in the workplace. 资方与工人之间的冲突使得工厂生产效率很低。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• This type of inefficiency arises because workers and management are ill-equipped. 出现此种低效率是因为工人与管理层都能力不足。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 taxpayers   

纳税人，纳税的机构( taxpayer的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Finance for education comes from taxpayers. 教育经费来自纳税人。
• She was declaiming against the waste of the taxpayers' money. 她慷慨陈词猛烈抨击对纳税人金钱的浪费。

3 subsidies   

n.补贴，津贴，补助金( subsidy的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• European agriculture ministers failed to break the deadlock over farm subsidies. 欧洲各国农业部长在农业补贴问题上未能打破僵局。
• Agricultural subsidies absorb about half the EU's income. 农业补贴占去了欧盟收入的大约一半。 来自《简明英汉词典》

4 heralded   

v.预示( herald的过去式和过去分词 )；宣布（好或重要）

参考例句：

• The singing of the birds heralded in the day. 鸟鸣报晓。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• A fanfare of trumpets heralded the arrival of the King. 嘹亮的小号声宣告了国王驾到。 来自《简明英汉词典》

5 ministry   

n.(政府的)部；牧师

参考例句：

• They sent a deputation to the ministry to complain.他们派了一个代表团到部里投诉。
• We probed the Air Ministry statements.我们调查了空军部的记录。

6 bureaucrats   

n.官僚( bureaucrat的名词复数 )；官僚主义；官僚主义者；官僚语言

参考例句：

• That is the fate of the bureaucrats, not the inspiration of statesmen. 那是官僚主义者的命运，而不是政治家的灵感。 来自辞典例句
• Big business and dozens of anonymous bureaucrats have as much power as Japan's top elected leaders. 大企业和许多不知名的官僚同日本选举出来的最高层领导者们的权力一样大。 来自辞典例句