The Land of the Rising Sun may have prided itself on meeting 100% of its rice needs, but it was suddenly faced with an unexpected shortage. Never before in history from Japan There was not such a shortage in the supply of rice for the country’s 125 million inhabitants as there is today.
Supermarket shelves, which until recently were stocked with all types of rice, have been emptied. Several supermarket chains, such as Ito-Yokado, have limited rice sales to one package per household.
Due to the shortage, the price of rice has even reached a 30-year high and some supermarkets have decided to raise prices even further, according to Japanese newspaper reports.
Rice stocks in storage fell to 1.56 million tonnes in June, a 20% drop from a year earlier and the lowest since 1999, when comparable data was first collected, according to the Agriculture Ministry: “The main reasons behind the historically low stocks are the reduction in production last year due to high temperatures combined with lack of water and the fact that rice is very cheap compared to other agricultural products such as wheat,” an Agriculture Ministry spokesman said.
Eating habits in Japan have also become more Westernized and demand for rice has declined. “Until recently, low rice prices had also discouraged young Japanese from becoming rice farmers, causing more and more elderly farmers to abandon the rice fields,” the Mainichi newspaper reported.
However, since the beginning of 2024, demand has increased for the first time in a decade.
Hypertourism and cheap yen
As pandemic restrictions have been eased, combined with a weaker yen, Japan has become a much more attractive tourist destination. The country recorded a new high of 21 million tourists between January and July 2024. “The reason is the sharp increase in demand, both from domestic consumption and the large influx of tourists,” writes the Japanese newspaper Nikkei. The rising demand coincided with poor weather conditions that led to smaller harvests.
Rice demand rose to 7 million tonnes between June 2023 and last month, an increase of 100,000 tonnes from a year earlier. During the same period, the number of foreign tourists more than doubled from a year earlier. Japan welcomed 17.78 million tourists in the first half of 2024, a million more than before the pandemic.
Assuming foreign tourists ate two meals of rice a day, the Agriculture Ministry estimated their rice demand at 51,000 tonnes – about 2.7 times higher than last year.
Climate change
Even if Japan wants to increase rice production, this seems difficult for many reasons. The policy of limiting the area of rice fields has reduced the amount of farmland used for rice cultivation by 20% in the last decade. Repurposing farmland for rice production will likely take several years and will be difficult for the aging population of rice farmers. 90% of rice farmers are over 60 years old.
Given the effects of climate change, it will likely be necessary to plant rice varieties that are more resistant to high temperatures. Heat-resistant seeds accounted for just over 14% of all rice grown in Japan in 2023.
The Japanese government hopes, however, that the new rice harvest that will hit the market by the end of September will solve the problem in the short term. But a long-term solution requires policy changes that can increase Japan’s rice supply in the long term.