A retail price of rice produced in 2016, a staple food for Japanese people, has not been rising as much as expected, the Japan Agricultural News’ latest survey found.
According to the survey, prices of 5-kg rice packages are centering mostly around 1800 yen in the consumer market, 50 to 100 yen or 3 to 5 percent up over the previous year. The increase in price is still smaller than that in advance payments made by local agricultural cooperatives and other trading firms to rice producers, which rose by 10 to 15 percent.
In many rice producing areas, the advance payments, which is equivalent to 80 to 90 percent of projected marketing price of rice, were raised for major varieties of rice produced in 2016 by 10 to 15 percent more than those in 2015. Because agricultural cooperatives and other rice shippers in the producing areas expected that their measures for balancing demand and supply of rice would be successfully implemented so that rice held in stock by private companies in the country could fall to a so-called proper level of 2 million tons by the end of June 2017.
The retail price of rice, however, is not rising as much as expected by producers, even though the rice stock is declining as expected in the market.
“Rice prices in the retail market have not yet recovered to a level enabling farmers to reproduce rice next year. But it will be difficult for the retail price to rise more under current economic condition,” a director of a major company in the rice wholesaling industry told a reporter of the Japan Agricultural News.
A representative of a prefectural headquarters of ZENNOH in the eastern part of Japan, National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations, said “It will be a more important task for us to secure member farmers’ incomes. We plan to promote contract farming between rice producers and end users as well as carry out a campaign of production cost reduction for those producers.”