Rice crisis: Japan releases strategic reserves to ease prices of nation’s most important food

By Chris Lau, Junko Ogura, Mai Takiguchi and Minori Konishi, CNN
3 minute read
Published 10:48 PM EDT, Sun April 6, 2025


A customer shops for rice at a Marusan supermarket in Koshigaya, Saitama Prefecture, Japan Soichiro Koriyama/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Tokyo (CNN) — It’s eaten with almost every meal, used to make sushi, made into sweets, fermented into alcohol and offered to the spirits at religious ceremonies. … Rice is everywhere in the diet of Japan – there are at least six ways in Japanese to describe the grain, from unhusked to ready to eat. It’s so popular that McDonald’s there added a burger bun made of rice to its menu.


But being so reliant on the staple leaves the country – the world’s fourth-biggest economy – vulnerable to the slightest supply glitch. … In recent years, a combination of bad weather, heatwaves and the threats of typhoons and earthquakes have sparked bouts of panic-buying in the nation of 124 million people.

The average price of a 60-kilogram bag rose to around $160 last year – up 55 per cent compared to two years ago, according to government figures. … The situation has become so dire that the government announced in February that it would release 210,000 tons of rice – more than a fifth of what it holds in its contingency reserve – for auction. The first bags of the reserve rice have now gone on sale in supermarkets.

{snip}