Japan’s farm minister yesterday said the government stood ready to offer more stockpiled rice, as consumers formed long lines to snatch up cheap, emergency-use grain made available through some retailers since the weekend.
In an abrupt change of policy, the government last week began selling stockpiled rice directly to retailers, aiming to get a 5kg bag to consumers for about ￥2,000 (US$14) — less than half of average prices.
Those products started hitting some store shelves at the weekend, when hundreds of people waited in line for hours at retailers such as Ito-Yokado and Aeon, despite being allowed just one bag per household.
Photo: Reuters
The doubling in rice prices since last year, partly due to extreme heat affecting production, has become a major concern for voters and policymakers ahead of two key elections — for the Tokyo metropolitan assembly on June 22 and parliament’s upper house next month.
“I never thought the price of stockpiled rice would fall this low,” 75-year-old Kazumi Uchida said, as she waited in line at an Ito-Yokado store in Tokyo on a rainy Saturday. “I’m almost out of rice and was shifting to eat more bread and noodles.”
Average supermarket prices fell for the first time in three weeks in the seven days to May 25, but only by ￥25 to average ￥4,260 per 5kg, showing limited impact from the release of stockpiled rice under the previous auction system involving several layers of wholesalers.
Japanese Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Shinjiro Koizumi, who scrapped that system upon taking his post on May 21, said the government could also consider buying back rice from wholesalers that had participated in those auctions since March, potentially bringing more of the staple grain to market at lower prices.
He repeated that the government stood ready to release all of its stockpile if necessary.
“If we let rice prices remain high, [store] shelves will be filled with imported rice,” he said.
It remains to be seen how the artificially cheap stockpiled rice would affect the price of single-origin “brand” rice and other products. Rice production is expected to rise for the 2025 harvest year.
As homegrown rice prices soared, demand for cheaper, foreign-made rice has also surged, even after the hefty levy Japan imposes to protect producers of its staple rice, beyond the tariff-free “minimum access” quota.
Private rice imports, while still tiny, quadrupled in the first 11 months of fiscal 2024 to just under 1,500 tonnes. Japan’s fiscal year runs from April to March.
Official data for the past few months are not yet available, but Japan Agricultural News reported that private imports surged to more than 6,800 tonnes in April alone.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS