The US sub-prime loan crisis is threatening to “fundamentally destabilise” the £600 billion financial system that supports Japan’s vast farming and fishing industries as the country’s huge agricultural bank staggers under massive investment losses and scrambles to raise £15 billion.

The funding problems at Norinchukin bank create ominous storm clouds over Japan’s thousands of farming co-operatives — the institutional middlemen between farmers and consumers. Government sources are even warning that the turmoil could derail a high-profile bid to make Japan self-sufficient in food.

Bleak warnings by experts at a government’s Research Institute of Economy Trade and Industry (RIETI) over the future stability of Japanese agriculture came as Norinchukin, the sprawling, unlisted agricultural bank, said today that it would tap its members for about Y2 trillion (£15 billion) in an emergency scramble to shore-up its capital base.

Norinchukin’s clout as the group investor of Japan’s historically wealthy farming sector has bequeathed it huge political status as a bank — it even sits on the panel in London responsible for fixing US dollar interbank rates. Agriculture Ministry sources say that the proposed fundraising drive is being “closely monitored” and may trigger an investigation by the Financial Services Agency.

The Y2 trillion sum that Norinchukin hopes to raise is expected to fill — just about — the abyss of investment losses sustained by the bank in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the huge valuation leakage on some of the other Y33 trillion of securitised debt instruments it held.

In November last year, Norinchukin said that it needed to raise only Y1 trillion, although analysts speculated at the time that the figure might have to be revised dramatically higher as equity markets plunged across the globe and credit deadlock battered the world’s second biggest economy.

The massive emergency capital-raising drive, which will see Norinchukin heading not to the mainstream markets but to the 4,000-plus agricultural co-operatives across Japan that have consistently fed it with new funds, follows a recent phase where the supposedly conservative agricultural bank became one of the most aggressive investment risk-takers in the heavyweight Japanese financial sector, boasting to reporters that it “would never incur losses” because of its skill as an investor.

The bank’s unhappy entanglement in complex financial products now casts a shadow over the lives of millions of Japanese. The nokyo agricultural cooperatives are, for many reasons, the binding force for much of Japan — a country which, despite its reputation for cutting-edge technology and manufacturing — has a giant agricultural heartland with substantial political power. The nokyo act as buyers and distributors of all agricultural produce, they operate fuel stations, lease farming equipment and, most critically, act as the financiers of all farming and fishing activities.

The relationship between Norinchukin and the nokyo agricultural cooperatives has always been a fragile one: both sides owe their survival to the other because the co-ops send their surplus deposits made in their credit businesses to Norinchukin to invest for them and cover the losses they make at the paddyfield level by subsidising tool hire and other operations.

Kazuhito Yamashita, a senior researcher at RIETI, wrote that given the current predicament with Norinchukin “I do think it is possible that nokyo will fall apart.”

Unfortunately, Norinchukin’s imminent cash call on the farming co-operatives comes as they are fighting ever harder for survival. The nokyo are rapidly losing deposits, Mr Yamashita said, for demographic reasons. Apart from the long-term migration away from agriculture, when old farmers die their urban-dwelling children inherit the huge financial deposits left for them in the co-operatives, but immediately move those funds to a swisher city bank.

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