A sofa is part of the debris left in a rice field in Sendai, Miyagi prefecture. The field was flooded by the tsunami which followed the March 11 earthquake. -- PHOTO: AP
His house destroyed, rice farmer Shinichi Shibasaki lives on a square of blue tarp on the top floor of a farming cooperative office with others like him. He has one set of soiled clothes. But all he can think about is getting back to work.
'If we start washing the soil out now, we can start growing our rice seedlings at the end of April at a different location, and plant them here a month later,' the 59-year-old said.
That may prove overly optimistic but agriculture experts say a quick recovery is possible, maybe within a year.
A key factor will be how long it takes for the salt to wash out from the fields, some still flooded with seawater. There are no official estimates yet of how much farmland was affected. A rough calculation based on last year's harvest in tsunami-hit towns indicates that, at most, 8 per cent of Japan's 1.6 million ha of rice farms has been hit, affecting about 4 per cent of total production.
A greater concern may be manpower. 'I'm worried that a lot of these elderly farmers are just going to leave their fields and not come back,' said Mr Masao Takahashi, an official in the Miyagi office of the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, a politically powerful national network of farming groups.
In Natori, 60-year-old rice farmer Kikuo Endo points to a shed full of ruined farm equipment, which he estimates was worth 10 million yen (S$155,000). 'People shouldn't give up but I don't think I will farm again.'
AP
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