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The story
The average retail price of rice has dropped below ¥3,000 per 5kg for the first time in two years. Triggered by the Nankai Trough earthquake advisory in August 2024, a shortage and price spike dubbed the “Reiwa Rice Riot” pushed prices up to a peak of ¥4,416 earlier this year, but as supply and demand eased, prices have fallen steadily over the past nine months. While this is welcome news for consumers, producers who had invested in expanding output are voicing alarm. On the thread, views welcoming the price drop clashed with criticism that agricultural co-ops (JA) and wholesalers are skimming off the profits, along with pointed remarks that it seems contradictory for farmers to cry crisis over falling prices when they claimed to be making “no profit at all” during the price surge.
The average retail price of rice has fallen below ¥3,000 per 5kg for the first time in two years.
With meat, eggs, vegetables and other prices staying elevated, the drop in the price of rice — the staple that anchors the dinner table — is welcome news for household budgets. On the other hand, producers are growing increasingly alarmed by the sharp decline.
Until July 2024, rice prices had been hovering in the high-¥1,000s to low-¥2,000s range. But following the Nankai Trough earthquake advisory issued that August, among other triggers, rice fell into short supply in what became known as the “Reiwa Rice Riot,” sending prices soaring. They hit a record high of ¥4,416 in early 2026. After that, as supply and demand eased, prices turned lower, falling by nearly ¥2,500 over nine months.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Wait, you can use a rice cooker for more than just cooking rice — you threw it out?
Not that I actually know what else it's good for lol
Even if you say you can't survive at pre-2023 prices, that's exactly where things are headed again.
Seriously, this.
Either grow something that actually turns a profit or get into a different line of work.
You raked in huge profits and now you're complaining?
It wasn't the farmers who made a killing — it was JA (the agricultural co-op) and the big wholesalers.
Farmers who got motivated last year and invested to ramp up production are now holding their heads in their hands watching prices free-fall since around this February.
So yeah, I get why forum posters here are coming down hard on farmers.
Two years ago I saw cheap pasta on Amazon, and now even that's roughly doubled in price. Tragic lol
Feels like it's up around 20%.
I can forgive price hikes on everything else.
Just not rice. I'm keeping up my boycott.
Canned goods are brutal too — a single can of Spam is ¥800, ¥880 with tax.
Our only option now is something other than rice.
Japan's rice culture has already been destroyed by the Ministry of Agriculture and JA.
Give up already, beggars.
It's no good saying you're switching to non-rice options if you just crawl back to domestic rice the moment prices drop.
The real retaliation is buying imported rice even if it's pricier or older than the domestic stuff.
The skimming middlemen — five layers of wholesalers sucking it dry
No matter how tasty the rice is, once it's over ¥3,000 per 5kg I just lose interest in buying it.
Come on, at least go with De Cecco instead of Barilla there.
Though even that runs about ¥600-something per kg.
And it's not even sold out — plenty left on the shelf.
At that price I'd buy it.
At Lopia.
Nice, not bad at all.
At Joyful Honda.
And once it starts climbing, today's cheap rice will vanish from supermarket shelves all at once and we'll be back to a shortage.
Even if there's another price surge, the government's stockpile hasn't been replenished, so there won't be much they can release.
The number of farmers quitting might increase, sure, but prices won't go back up.
If that's true, then a price drop shouldn't change anything for them either.
Was it a lie that higher rice prices had nothing to do with farmers?
Of course it matters — the higher price was finally a fair price.
If it drops back down, farmers go back into the red, which is a serious problem.
If farmers keep getting worn down like this, prices will end up staying permanently high.
This time farmers still had some spare production capacity, so they ramped up output and stock recovered — but next time supply really won't keep up.
The right approach is probably to target subsidies based on farm size and productivity.
There's no point throwing money indiscriminately at tiny farms with essentially zero productivity.
That said, small-scale farmers working unavoidable terrain like mountainous areas probably deserve at least some support too.
Come on, reflect the rice market price already.
Iris Ohyama be like: "If we cut the price, the rice we worked so hard to make would sell at a loss."
The 3-pack microwave rice that kept its price low right up to the edge even during the rice price surge has actually dropped to around ¥300.
I figured they wouldn't bother cutting prices even after rice got cheaper, so this bumped them up a bit in my book.
And word is those big operations can still turn a profit even at ¥1,000 per 5kg.
Actually, it's the large full-time farming operations that are struggling the most right now.
Fertilizer, labor costs, interest rates — everything's up, and it's brutal.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The price of rice isn’t directly tied to what producers actually take home. Because rice passes through a distribution chain of collection, wholesale, and retail before reaching store shelves, swings in the retail price don’t necessarily translate one-to-one into farmer profits — and it’s easy to overlook that production costs like fertilizer, labor, and interest rates remain stubbornly high. The thread’s pointed remark that “farmers said they weren’t making money when prices went up” zeroes in on exactly this disconnect, but neither the article nor the posts can pin down whether it was actually JA and the big wholesalers, or the producers themselves, who captured the extra profit. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the government’s capacity to release stockpiled rice has remained diminished since this bout of high prices, which will be a key factor shaping how sharply prices swing the next time supply gets tight.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Crisis Mounts as Rice Prices Fall — Below ¥3,000 per 5kg, Producers Worry.”
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