Rice?
Interesting read from 2025 about Japan's rice crisis
https://apnews.com/article/japan-rice-explainer-shortages-rising-prices-agriculture-6e21bc9017c8f6d8c0a1f179e50e975f
One learns that Japan's minister for agriculture had to step down after callous remarks.
One also learns that rice 'disappeared in 2024' and 'no one knew where it went', so the govt opened the rice storage to keep prices down but was hindered by not having enough mills operating for turning the masses of stored, brown rice into white rice.
One learns that Japanese strongly prefer national crop, don't like imported rice.
And one learns that the average age of farmers is 69. ^^
Climate? Yeah, sort of. "the 2023 harvest was relatively poor because of hot weather and pests".
***
Looking at trade data https://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/fr/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=37
, Japan's rice exports in 2023 (most of the calendar year was pre-crop failure) were also over 3 times higher, with 240,000 tons compared to the usual 72,000 tons. So somewhere someone had a bad harvest in 2022 and was willing to pay higher prices in 2023 for Japanese crop than what wholesalers got in-country pre-crop failure?
2022 was a bad [rice] year for Pakistan and India with un-seasonally early heatwaveS and then the monster monsoon in July-August. India "banned" rice export in 2023 and 2024 because of that.
Well, "ban" doesn't mean ban, apparently.
Maybe existing contracts had to be met despite the ban so that rice exports only fell from 22 million tons in 2022 to 18 and 17 million tons in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
And something extraordinary in 2024 caused Vietnam to import 5 times as much rice than in 2023 and 2021 – and a whopping 50 times more than in 2019, 5.7 million tons in 2024 compared to 90,000 tons in 2019.
Filling national rice reserves probably. But maybe also bad harvests?
Thailand on the other hand exported 2mio tons more in 2024 than what was common in the years before.
The rice trade data really looks volatile in the years 2022ff, compared to all the years since 2008.
Quick global look at price-only – which says nothing about availability in tons to actually feed people: https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/rice-price?op=1
FAO data is … political ^^ so I take it with a grain of salt (or rice).
But it's concerning how, despite sharp increase in area planted with rice in 2023 and 2024, the produced harvest doesn't match that increase, see picture from https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL/visualize
Could be just a glitch or a peculiarity of newly installed rice paddies which perhaps do not produce as much in their first years?
But could also be that the crop is at its maximum capacity and adding more area [in the same climate zone] doesn't lead to bigger harvests anymore.
#affordabilitycrisis #rice #Japan #Asia #climateChange
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