The approval rating for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Cabinet was 33 percent, while the disapproval rating further rose to 64 percent, according to the poll conducted in March by the Japan Agricultural News for its subscribers, mostly farmers, registered as agricultural policy monitors throughout the country.
These figures have been supposedly reflected by dissatisfaction with Abe’s Administration, prevailing among farmers and their supporters, which agreed on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade pact with 11 countries and plans to carry out a radical reform in the agricultural policy.
The Cabinet’s support rate marked a decline whenever an agricultural policy reform was advocated by the government. When the farm policy reform centering on a revised scheme for rice production adjustment was put into practice, the support rate declined to 44.7 percent by 8.6 points in the survey made by the Japan Agricultural News in August 2014. The disapproval rate surpassed the approval rate for the first time at this poll.
In July 2015 when a bill of the Agricultural Cooperative Law revision passed the Lower House, the poll showed the Cabinet’s approval rating declined to 36.6 percent by 7.9 points. And the latest poll told that the support rate further went down to 33.3 percent before the Diet members begin full-scale deliberations on the TPP ratification.
Meanwhile the latest survey showed the ruling party, Liberal Democratic Party, was supported by 40.7 percent of the subscribers polled, higher than any other political parties in the country.