Perché il costo del riso in Giappone è alle stelle

Perché il costo del riso in Giappone è alle stelle

The cost of rice in Japan has gone absolutely crazy. It has more than doubled in the past year. And if anyone takes their rice seriously, it’s the Japanese. The average person in 2022 ate 51 kg of rice in that year alone. Japan’s voracious rice eaters are almost entirely reliant on rice grown within the country. That means that when domestic production stumbles, everyone’s exposed. A bad harvest in 2023 because of extreme heat is still hurting the rice market. Some locals complain that record levels of foreign tourists are responsible for the higher rice prices coming into Japan, gobbling up the fluffy carbohydrate and leaving none left for them. But in reality, it’s Japan’s broken system of rice production that’s to blame. Since the 1970s, Japan has quietly restricted rice production under a policy known as Gentan Seasaku. This was designed to artificially keep prices high for farmers. But as Japanese people began eating less rice over the years, the government intervened to prevent over supply. They paid farmers to plant less in order to stabilize prices. That policy was officially scrapped in 2018, though still it lives on. And in addition, other policies like extremely high tariff rates on foreign rice leave the market with very little room for maneuver. What that means is even small disturbances can cascade into far bigger disruptions. With Japan, they won’t take rice and yet they desperately need rice. You know that Japan’s government has nearly emptied its strategic stockpile of rice reserves in an attempt to keep prices down. Initially, it had around 910,000 tons of rice in reserve. That’s enough to feed the entire Japanese population for around 2 months, but now there’s only around 100,000 tons left. Japan’s not the only country with a strategic food reserve. Canada’s maple syrup reserve can hold over 100 million pounds of the liquid gold. In China, supply shocks from swine flu and trade wars with America can be overcome by tapping into its strategic pork reserve. And poor harvests of cabbage due to climate change have prompted the South Korean government to improve its stockpiling infrastructure for cabbages and kimchi. Look, strategic food reserves can of course be useful. And in a world of rising economic protectionism, of growing geopolitical rifts, and of climate change, their appeal is only getting bigger. But the case of Japan shows why it’s important to get the basics right. It’s all well and good to have a food stockpile, but not if you’re on the other hand creating artificial scarcity with protectionism and decades of flawed agricultural policy. That’s a self-inflicted problem that no stockpile, however big, is going to fix. That’s pretty good.

The price of rice in Japan has more than doubled in the past year. While some are blaming the shortage on the influx of foreign tourists, Ethan Wu, our Asia business and finance editor, explains why it is really Japan’s broken production system that is to blame