2025-05-20
22 分钟Welcome to The Inquiry. I'm Charmaine Kosia.
Each week, one question, four expert witnesses, and an answer.
March 2025, South Korea.
Two tonnes of rice is sold to a company in Japan, and another 20 tonnes are on order.
Japan buys a lot of its food from other countries.
However,
this is no ordinary business deal because it's been 25 years
since it last imported the staple food grain from South Korea.
It's happening now because homegrown rice is unavailable in many places across Japan.
The situation is so serious that the government makes an unusual decision to try and fix it.
But that plan to call demand and prices by boosting supplies isn't working.
So this week we're asking, what does Japan's rice crisis say about its economy?
So people walk into the supermarket in order to purchase rice,
but they realise that the shelves are empty.
There's no rice on the shelf and they cannot get rice.
Ichon Ko is a professor at the Asian Growth Research Institute in Fukuoka, Japan.
Even though there were no formal price controls by the retailers,
but some limited the amount of rice customers could buy to prevent hoarding.
The events that pushed Japan to a nationwide rice shortage have been simmering for some time.
It wasn't just one thing, but was a mix of short-term and long-term factors.