The fiscal 2005 white paper on agriculture, made public last month, covers the first year of the implementation of the nation's basic plan for food, agriculture and agricultural communities that was adopted in March 2005. The plan is based on the 1999 basic law, which spells out four fundamental goals: securing a stable supply of food, bringing into full play the various functions of land used for agriculture, ensuring the sustainable growth of agriculture, and promoting the advancement of agricultural communities. To revitalize itself, the nation's agricultural sector first must step up efforts to gain public trust and support by promoting a stable food supply, food safety, and the ability to meet diversified consumer demand.

For the first time, the government annual report takes up, prefecture by prefecture, self-sufficiency rates for food supply. Because this rate is influenced by people's food preferences and changes in foreign exchange rates, and because agricultural products freely move from prefecture to prefecture, setting a specific self-sufficiency rate as a policy goal for each prefecture would not have much relevance. But tracking changes in each prefecture's rate over a long period will increase awareness of the nation's overall food self-sufficiency. It may also help farmers and agricultural policy planners adjust agricultural production to better suit reality.

Japan's calorie-based self-sufficiency rate was 73 percent in fiscal 1965. By 1998, though, it had dropped to 40 percent and remained there for seven consecutive years through fiscal 2004. The self-sufficiency rate based on the "value of agricultural output" was 70 percent in both fiscal 2003 and 2004. The basic plan calls for raising the calorie-based self-sufficiency rate to 45 percent and the output-based self-sufficiency rate to 76 percent by the end of fiscal 2015.