I guess this is uplifting is you don’t have a rice farm…
Capitalism makes this both uplifting and awful.
Isn’t it more of a unplanned, free market problem? Related to capitalism (stock market), but not really capitalism.
Making a need a commodity is 100% capitalism.
I’m pretty sure every economic system will put a value on food
Having value isn’t the same as exploiting value for financial gain.
Cool, though I’m yet to see this in my own country. Here, the price of rice seems to be on an all-time high.
Eggs, though, are cheaper than ever, literally thrice as cheap as they were (winks to Americans)
The prices are not going to budge down. Any country with a brain will be buying the cheaper rice and adding it to their national food reserves. As global warming will make farming less reliable and you better fucking stockpile because famines are coming everywhere.
Rice is a perishable. It cannot be stored for too long.
30+ years is not too long?
https://extension.usu.edu/preserve-the-harvest/research/storing-white-rice
Sooo… Consumer prices on rice products will come down then? </s>
I understand the economic theory, I am honestly just a jaded ass at this point. It will be great if supply prices come down and restaurants don’t pay as much for the rice, but consumer prices will always be downward inflexible, so they will just pocket the extra profit and we are still shafted. Some places may lower prices to attempt to compete more, but not by as much as their margins increase.
Good to hear. I don’t see Japan mentioned in the article, hopefully this resolves their shortage.
Japan’s “rice crisis” is totally self-inflicted and very solvable.
At the cost of their domestic food security.
Did we not learn from the pandemic?
Japan has no domestic food security, it imports 60% of all food (one of the highest in the world btw) and it would be unsustainable any other way so it must have a strong trade policy. This makes the recent Japanese alt right moves all more idiotic.
Makes a lot of sense to try and preserve the remaining 40% then
How? The bottle neck is workable land not farmer incentive.
Farmers being 80 years old and young people moving to the cities doesn’t help.
Nor do the laws making it essentially impossible for foreign nationals to own and manage farmland.
Definitely. I lookup Japan’s immigration programs every year and every year is not good enough for anyone worth their salt to bother, especially when compared to neighboring countries. Also the current political shift to right is a major red flag.
I thought the issue was japan not importing rice, not necessarily a global shortage
Thought I read somewhere a long time ago that they imported a bunch of rice from the US as a result of some trade agreement. But they don’t want to eat the rice from the US because it’s lower quality. So it doesn’t get sold for human consumption. Though I guess they use it to make other stuff. Like you could ferment and distill it.
They were using it for pig feed.
Iirc we use American rice in cheaper restaurants and donate it for himantarian aid overseas but I imagine not many people, myself included, would buy American rice at the grocery stores unless absolutely necessary.
