Expensive Rice in Japan

In a change of pace from talking about what I've been doing in Japan, I figured I should talk about some recent topics that have been hitting the news in Japan. One of the big topics is the cost of rice.

The cost of rice in Japan has risen to over 4,000 yen for 5kg of rice. Normally that much rice would cost around 2,000 yen. The reason for the increase in the price of rice is due to a poor harvest back in 2023, due to high temperatures. Only recently has the country started to feel the shortage of rice available to purchase. 

Now, the government has several hundred thousand tons of rice that it has put aside for emergency purposes. Of course, rice has a limited shelf life before it spoils, so it usually releases that rice to the public, and replace that released rice with newer harvest. In response the shortage of rice, the government decided to release of its reserve rice in an attempt to provide relief for the increasing costs of rice. Problem is, this was done back in March, and prices are still going up. The problem seems to lie with the wholesalers who purchase the rice released by the government. Despite 210,000 tons of rice being released to wholesalers, many are holding off on supplying the rice to stores and supermarkets in fear of another rice shortage this summer. While I can't remember the exact number that was cited on the news recently, I believe it was less than 10% of the released rice had actually made its way to the supermarkets. The government has taken additional measures to solve this problem, but these didn't take effect until the last of last month.
The other cause of this is possibly being that there is more demand than what the government had predicted, and they're playing catch up as a result.

Hopefully, we'll soon see the price of rice drop, but given that wholesalers are hoarding the rice in fear of another shortage this summer, I'm not holding my breath. We will probably have to adjust our budget and what we eat, as have recently started eating pasta again at home after so long.