local government officers allocate to villages, so village officers allocate to each hamlet.
Thus, this process profoundly influences the allocation among hamlets and eventually
the allocation among farmers.
Within an amount of set-aside acreage assigned to a hamlet, each farmer is allowed,
as a rule, to adjust the assigned acreage by negotiating with neighboring farmers.
Nevertheless, in reality, the leader of the hamlet assigns the set-aside acreage of each
farmer proportionate to the size of each farm as a top-down impost.
It should be noted that, unlike set-aside programs in other countries, the subsidies
to the farmers are not sufficient to compensate the income loss2 caused by the reduction
of rice production. Although farmers must, on the surface, follow the request of the
hamlet’s leader, they realize that the acceptance of an allocation results in net income
loss and they have a justified grievance against this program. One of the most decisive
factors which oblige farmers to fulfill a top-down impost of set-aside acreage, in spite of
their unwillingness and their free-riding incentives, is commonly said to be the effect of
mutual surveillance among farmers which a rural small community inherently possess.
Since farmers do not want to be regarded as an uncooperative in a relatively closed and
fixed community, they usually undertake their duty, albeit reluctantly.
Although farmers rarely utter grievances directly to government and take no
radical resistive action such as anti-set-aside rallies or demonstrations, some of them
occasionally direct bitter complaints about the allocation to the hamlet’s leader at
community meetings. Naturally, such complaints are transmitted from these leaders to
local governments’ officers and eventually to bureaucrats. They also may be transmitted
from village agricultural cooperatives to prefectural federations of cooperatives and
sometimes to politicians elected from their prefectures through lobbying.
2 Until ten years ago, the rice price had been directly controlled by government.
Recently, such a stringent control of the price has been abolished. Nevertheless, still
now the rice price is artificially sustained at the level higher than that at the supposed
market equilibrium due to indirect price control by the set-aside program. Income loss is
considerably large partly because of this artificial rice price support and partly because
of low levels of other crops’ prices and yields.