Mobilizing Science, Technology, and Innovation to Transform Japanese Agriculture

The agricultural sector in Japan is currently undergoing drastic changes. A comparison of statistical data for the years 1980 to 2016 shows that gross agricultural production decreased from 10.3 trillion yen to 8.8 trillion yen, agricultural land decreased from 5.46 million hectares (ha) to 4.47 million ha, the working population in the agricultural sector decreased from 6.97 million to 1.92 million, and the food self-suff iciency rate decreased from 53% to 39%, indicating a clear contracting tendency for agriculture in Japan. Moreover, the total area of farmland that has been abandoned because small-scale farmers quit or did not have a successor has increased from 123,000 ha to 284,000 ha, and the average age of farmers has greatly increased—reaching 66.8 years old in 2016. As a response to these trends, there has been an accumulation of agricultural land for specif ic core farmers,1 a trend that is expected to continue. Japanese agriculture is thus drastically changing from small-scale farming to large-scale farming with fewer workers. However, complex farmland structures with numerous small independent farms still remain in many places, making the productivity of agriculture in Japan low compared with that of other developed countries.