Growth market: raising Japanese rice in ThailandーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS
A rice shortage in Japan has driven up prices off the staple. This situation has opened up a business opportunity in Thailand where farmers are growing rice to meet the exacting exacting standards of Japanese consumers. Enke’s Asai Kesuk has a story. In a Bangkok supermarket, Japanese rice shares the shelf space with domestic varieties. It’s high quality and reasonably priced, so there’s a growing demand for it. In recent years, more and more farmers in Thailand have started growing Japanese rice. One of them is Norake Yuya. He works for a major Japanese rice milling company. Norake’s goal is to export rice to Japan where officials expect the aging population will lead to a shortage of producers. The decline in the number of farmers in Japan is very noticeable and we are concerned this will continue and accelerate even further. We need to do something about this situation. Norake is based in Chennai in northern Thailand. This mountainous region is blessed with abundant water and land suitable for producing Japanese rice. The climate is warm year round, so farmers can harvest twice a year. Rice for the Japanese market is required to be of high quality and produced efficiently. GPS keeps this self-driving rice planting machine on the straight course so that the seedlings are evenly spaced. A drone is used to spray fertilizer. AI analyzes satellite images to monitor growth in the rice fields. It also tracks the weather and temperature to determine the best times to spray fertilizer. It used to take a whole day to spray fertilizer, but the drone can do it in two to three hours. This gives me more time to tackle other tasks. Food safety is of utmost importance. Norake uses a high precision sorting machine from Japan to keep small pebbles and other impurities out of the rice. On this day, Norake is visiting company officials who sell sushi and other products in supermarkets in Thailand and Japan. We are a sushi restaurant, so the main thing we want is rice that goes well with sushi. I think bringing in Thai grown Japanese rice is one option. Nowadays, imported rice is seen as a substitute for domestically produced rice. But rather than a substitute, we want people to think of it as an option and to choose rice from Tien Rai, Thailand because it’s delicious. Throughout Asia, rice producing countries are hoping to break into the Japanese market. Producers are stepping up to the challenge of meeting the needs of discerning Japanese consumers. NHK World Bank Bangkok.
Farmers in Thailand are eyeing a business opportunity in Japan, where domestic rice and the people who grow it are in increasingly short supply. #thailand #japan #food
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