The population engaged in Japan's primary industries like fishing and farming are declining. One reason why so few households rely solely on income from farming is that farms are very small.
Japan is now the world's largest net importer of agricultural products.
At the end of 1993, as part of an accord on agriculture reached in the framework of the Uruguay round of multilateral trade talks, Japan moved away from its policy of complete self-sufficiency in rice and agreed to partial liberalization of its rice market. Japan's reliance on foreign agricultural imports is expected to increase still further in the future with the yen's sharp appreciation and the implementation of the Uruguay round accord. Japan's fishing industry, like agriculture, has been declining in recent decades. The total fishing catch peaked at 12.8 million tons in 1984 and dipped to 8.1 million tons in 1994. The catch from deep-sea fishing peaked much earlier, in 1970, at 3.4 million tons, and it had fallen to 1.1 million tons by 1994.