CCTV9英语新闻12月：日本的水稻农场改革（在线收听）

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 inefficiency, due to a government policy that pays over a million farmers to leave a third of their fields empty. The system has cost taxpayers 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 subsidies by 2016, a move that's been heralded by the media as the end of the four decade old system, known as "gentan".

But one former Agriculture Ministry 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 bureaucrats 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%.