The first of the city's mistakes is its infamous policy of reducing rice acreage. To say that "since there's too much rice you must till fewer paddies" is nothing more than a kindergartner's idea for a solution. Is this the best idea that the elite bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture could come up with? And when we see that the politicians representing the farming villages just let this pass, it is obvious that they are not much smarter. Long ago, in China, they say that even with nine years' worth of rice stored they still had shortages. So what is all the excitement over a three or four months' excess? You, in the cities! This is the rice you're eating. Offer all those office buildings as rice storage facilities. We should fill those buildings up with unhulled rice. Should there ever be a food shortage, all those office buildings and hotels will be worthless compared to rice. When the Pol Pot regime instituted the barter system, the capitol of Phnom Penh was instantly converted into an empty shell. This is because the former residents left the hotels and offices behind and went from farming village to farming village in search of food. If we were to set a nine years' supply of rice as our goal there would be no shortages because of frost damage, and no need to import rice; at the same time there would be no need for an acreage reduction policy. In such a situation there should be no need to discuss costs. Since this is the rice that they would all be eating, they should do the work for free. When it comes down to actually carrying out this plan, the money economy will probably fall apart, anyway. [17] The second of the human-caused disasters is the infrastructure industry. In order to build infrastructure, the government blows trillions of yen destroying the paddies tilled by generations of ancestors, and for that reason we are seeing a reduction in the rice harvests (let us not overlook the effects of the dense planting by machines, the damage due to causing the rice to grow too thickly, and the ill effects of the great quantities of chemicals). The government says that the farmers benefit from infrastructure, but we are actually the victims of it. In reality those who benefit are the government; the farming co-ops; the manufacturers of machines, fertilizers, and agricultural chemicals; the rice wholesalers; and the consumers, all of whom belong to the cities. What this means is that the city has created a system by which it can control the production of our staple food as it pleases. The stupid farmers have given the city permanent control over the production of rice for a mere pittance in subsidies.