Japan crosses a ‘rice crisis’, a basic food of the local diet that has increased 90% in the last year in the context of generalized inflation and speculation among wholesalers following an episode of panic purchases after an alert without precedents of ‘megaterremoto’ in the archipelago.
To try to keep this phenomenon at bay and try to stabilize runaway prices, the Japanese executive has decided to free 210,000 tons from the National Rice Reserve from mid -March, something unpublished so far.
The origin of the problem dates back to the government’s own decision to issue a special alert last summer in the face The buckets of the shops razed for weeks.
The private sector inventory then fell to its lowest level in a quarter of a century, due to the already strong national demand and a rise of tourism.
The shortage led to a price increase that the authorities predicted that the stocks were replaced with the autumn harvest, but to the collective panic episode a black hole was added in the stocks of the main distributors that has fired the value of the food to record levels.
Harvest ‘missing’
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Silviculture and Fisheries, in 2024 6.79 million tons of rice, 180,000 tons more than in the previous year, were harvested in Japan, but the amount acquired by the distributors was 210,000 tons lower than that of 2023.
It is believed that ‘losses’ tons have gone to speculators, some outside the rice trade until then, who have tried to take advantage of their shortage to inflate prices.
Kunio Nishikawa, expert in agricultural policy and attached professor at the University of Ibaraki, considers that a certain level of speculation is “inevitable”, given the interest that the current situation is generating in the sector and its economic potential.
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Japan created his national rice reserves in 1995 after a serious rice shortage two years before for an unusually cold summer. Every year, the Government stores about 200,000 tons to ensure stocks in case of emergency.
After being reluctant to touch these provisions at first, since its use had been reserved for reasons outside the market, such as the natural disasters of 2011 and the Kumamoto earthquakes in 2016, the Executive reviewed at the beginning of this year its guidelines to allow this placed in circulation of their reserves, which is not ruled out that others follow.
Nishikawa considers that the measure will have some prices effect, but that the market will accommodate in the medium and long term, and the problem will not be solved without enough offer, so it believes that farmers will increase their production this year.
Threat to local agriculture
This increase in rice, which mainly affects that of national production -with the most consumed in the country and pillar of Japanese agriculture -has generated a growing interest in imported rice that threatens the highly protected Japanese agricultural sector.
For the first time in seven years, the entire rice imported by Japan in 2024 for basic feed Private sector increased by 468 tons, a hundred more than throughout 2023.
Given the prices, there is an increasing trend among shops, especially those of the restoration, to use imported rice despite its high tariffs to meet demand in a country already rice that, in addition, it crosses a tourist bum.
This is the case of the well-known Japanese restoration chains Matsuya and Yoshinoya, or the Colowide group, which uses Rice imported from California in some of the premises of their Gyu-Kaku, On-Yasai and Karubi Taisho chains.
The production of that American rice is three or four times cheaper than in Japan, so, if there is no current tariffs, it would be cheap in the Japanese market, explains Nishikawa.
For the expert, the main problem of importing imports is that Japanese consumers have discovered the existence of an alternative to national rice.
“If rice prices continue to rise, criticisms of the current government policy to restrict imports could extend,” says Nishikawa.
On exports of Japanese rice, which are a small percentage with respect to production, but they chained their twelfth consecutive year of record value for Japanese accounts (1.5 billion yen, about 9.5 billion euros), the expert believes that Its increase is something positive.
“Currently the shortage in supply and demand is felt, but in the long term the consumption of rice is falling into about 10 tons per year at least, (…) so the national market is being reduced. Exports allow farmers to maintain their productions, ”says Japanese.
With EFE information.
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