Japan's drying rice paddies are now a national security threat

TOKYO • Russian missiles pounding Ukraine have spooked Japan into boosting defence spending. Now, with tensions rising over the Taiwan Strait, calls are growing to address another security threat: shrivelling rice paddies.

For decades now, Japanese people have been eating less rice and fish in favour of more bread, meat and edible oil, leading the country's calorie-based food self-sufficiency ratio to slump to 37 per cent in 2020 from 73 per cent in 1965 - the lowest among major economies.

The impact of higher global grain prices, fertiliser shortages and fuel inflation, exacerbated by a weaker yen, had already been filtering through to Japanese consumers in recent months. But any major blockade or disruption to sea lanes around China and the Taiwan Strait could have bigger implications than just price inflation.

Unlike the United States and European Union, Japan would have little to fall back on should food imports dry up. To ensure national security, it is crucial for Japan to increase the amount of rice and wheat grown domestically, according to Professor Nobuhiro Suzuki, who teaches agricultural economics at the University of Tokyo.

"In terms of national security, food should come before weapons," he said. "If you don't have food, you can't fight."

Japan's shift away from a rice-dominated diet was driven in part by higher per capita income. An expansion in global trade ushered in more imported foods, while exposure to travel and TV encouraged more diverse eating habits. The growing ranks of working women and single people also brought about lifestyle changes and the embrace of fast food.

Another major factor behind the fall in the self-sufficiency ratio has been Japan's near-total dependency on imported grains for animal feed. That means most domestically raised beef is not counted in self-sufficiency calculations.

The increased reliance on imports worries former agriculture minister Hiroshi Moriyama. In June, he led a group of ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers that submitted a report to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, calling for more government action on food security.

"Through the Ukraine situation, we've realised that what you can do domestically, you should," he said in an interview.

The government is in the midst of carving out a new budget for food security as part of next year's spending, not an easy task as the ageing and indebted nation also seeks funds for a promised radical upgrade of its military.

Government officials and the farming industry have tried over the years to encourage consumers to eat more rice. Nearly all of the rice eaten in Japan - mostly a translucent, short-grain variety called Japonica - is grown in the country, and bureaucrats have calculated that getting people to eat just an extra mouthful of it at each meal could raise the food self-sufficiency ratio by 1 per cent.

There has been no success so far: The average Japanese person now eats 53kg of rice per year, less than half of what was eaten in the mid-1960s.

Surveys show more people are trying to avoid loading up on carbohydrates for health reasons, and an ageing population means fewer people have an appetite for extra servings. Many younger workers also say cooking Japanese rice properly, which involves soaking grains for up to an hour beforehand, is too time-consuming.

Faced with declining rice consumption, and demand from the politically powerful farming bloc to support prices, the government has used a variety of measures to reduce rice production since around 1970. It offers subsidies to farmers who switch from producing rice for the dinner table to other crops, including low-grade feed rice, and rice used for flour.

Yet, demand is declining faster than production, and wholesale prices have fallen over 20 per cent in the past decade, according to government data.

Former agriculture ministry official Kazuhito Yamashita advocates what could be considered a radical strategy: abandoning the policy of reducing production and allowing prices to fall.

By improving yields and expanding the area under cultivation, rice production could be expanded to 16 million tonnes a year from the current seven million, he said.

The resulting lower prices would make Japanese rice more attractive as an export product.

In the event of a contingency, the government could simply halt exports and the population could survive at least for a while on rice, he said.

BLOOMBERG