ZEN-NOH (National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations) or a national marketing and supply business organization of agricultural cooperatives (JAs) held an extraordinary general representative meeting on March 28 to decide its business reform policies and annual business program with a special emphasis on an increase in farmer’s income.
Competitive biddings will be widely applied to ZEN-NOH’s purchases of production inputs from manufacturers so as to lower prices of the inputs to be supplied to JA’s member farmers by getting the advantage of scale in JA’s joint purchasing business system.
ZEN-NOH plans to considerably reduce diversified brands of fertilizers to cut their supply prices. In fiscal 2017, for instance, a number of various high-analysis compound fertilizers will decrease from the existing 400 to around 10.
In its marketing business, ZEN-NOH further promotes direct marketing of farm products to retail shops and food service chains without using channels of wholesalers.
ZEN-NOH sold about 800 thousand tons of rice directly to food service industries in 2016, accounting some 40 percent of its total transactions of food rice. It now aims at increasing the direct sales up to 1.8 million tons or 90 percent by the year of 2024.
ZEN-NOH also aims to reform its marketing business from its consignment and pool account-based operation to a so-called “cash-in-advance” system which makes ZEN-NOH purchase farm products from producers to sell them in the market at its own risk.
Through such reform, the amount of rice to be purchased from farmers will increase from 220 thousand tons in fiscal 2016 to 1.4 million tons in fiscal 2014. The share of rice to be directly purchased from producers will rise to some 70 percent.
ZEN-NOH plans to boost the value of agricultural exports from 13 billion yen in fiscal 2016 to 34 billion yen in fiscal 2019.