The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries will focus on encouraging consolidation of farmlands between fiscal 2013 and 2015, by establishing a fund to offer more money to districts which provide larger proportion of land to farmland consolidation banks.
The banks will be created in each prefecture before the end of March in line with a legislation passed in the Diet. The banks will rent farmlands from aged farmers and others who have difficulty cultivating the land, replot them to form larger plots with proper agricultural infrastructure and lend them to large-scale farmers and agricultural corporations. The ministry hopes to work intensively in the three years to speed up farmland consolidation.
The ministry allocated a total of JPY 0.5 billion for the banks, JPY 40 billion in the supplementary budget for fiscal 2013 and JPY 30.5 billion in the fiscal 2014 budget.
JPY 14 billion will be allocated for the new fund to subsidize districts which formed a master plan to consolidate farmlands through the banks and identify prospective farmers who will take the lead in utilizing the lands efficiently. The amount of payments to districts will be doubled until the end of fiscal 2015, with districts which lend between 20 and 50 percent of farmlands to farmland consolidation banks receiving JPY 20,000 per 10 ares. The amount will be JPY 28,000 for districts which lend between 50 and 80 percent of farmlands, and JPY 36,000 for districts which provide more than 80 percent of farmlands. How to spend the money will be decided by each district, including land owners and borrowers.
In order to facilitate the process further, the ministry also allocated JPY 4.5 billion to finance a new fund to provide money to farmland owners or farmers who cultivate borrowed land who lend to the banks large-scale plots or plots located adjacent to the land collected by the bank.
The plots should be lent to the banks for a period of 10 years or more, and if the banks find farmers who will borrow the lands, those who lent the lands will receive JPY 20,000 per 10ares, which is four times more than the basic amount. This amount will be applied until the end of fiscal 2015. The bank will provide a substitute land if a lender asks for it.
Meanwhile, the ministry abolished the system of providing JPY 20,000 per 10ares to farmers who expanded their scale of farming by consolidating small plots of land.
(Jan. 7, 2014)