Provisional purchase prices for 2026-harvest rice (per 60kg, grade 1), announced by JA Zen-Noh’s Tohoku prefectural chapters, have fallen 30-40% from the previous year for major brands, returning to roughly 2024-harvest levels. The drop comes as unsold 2025-harvest rice stockpiles have built up nationwide, and prices could fall further. On 5ch, voices blaming agricultural policy and JA’s supply control for driving prices up and then crashing them mixed with consumers who switched to wheat and pasta during the price spike now saying “there’s no reason to go back to rice” — opinions split over next year’s production levels and the ongoing shift away from rice.
Provisional prices for 2026-harvest rice (per 60kg, grade 1) — the advance payments that JA Zen-Noh’s Tohoku prefectural chapters make to local JA co-ops — are now all in. Major brands fell 30-40% from 2025-harvest levels, landing roughly back at 2024-harvest prices. The backdrop is a nationwide buildup of unsold 2025-harvest rice stock. Rice prices are expected to fall further, and a hit to producers’ finances looks unavoidable.
The provisional prices for major brands announced by each prefectural chapter are shown in the table.
Most brands now sit in the ¥17,000 range — a stark reversal from the roughly ¥30,000 seen for 2025-harvest rice.
Source: kahoku.news / Original article here
Tohoku: 8.21 million
Kanto: 43.57 million
Koshinetsu: 5.05 million
Tokai: 14.70 million
Hokuriku: 2.92 million
Kansai: 20.18 million
Chugoku: 7.60 million
Shikoku: 3.63 million
Kyushu: 12.50 million
Okinawa: 1.47 million
but on top of hoarding stock by refusing to sell, they basically told people 'eat something else if you don't like it' and handed the market over to competitors.
I've fully switched to flour, pasta, oatmeal, and occasionally pearl barley.
I don't even bother keeping space around for storing rice grains anymore.
and domestic rice will fetch high prices again.
It won't drop that much.
If anything, with the rice-acreage-reduction policy scrapped,
output should rise at a steady clip.
JA's middleman wholesalers overplayed their hand
and ticked off PM Takaichi.
No way.
If prices spike again, the shift away from rice only accelerates.
JA's rice farming model is already finished.
Both the public and restaurants are saying no to it now.
Udon, pasta, bread, and imported rice will keep gaining ground.
If they don't cut acreage, prices will just keep crashing harder.
People got fed up with how rotten the rice industry is and thought 'there are plenty of other carbs!' and switched — and once you've done that, you realize there's no real reason to go back to rice.
Take the hint — not a single Japanese person has ever won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
That's when the tide turned.
If a contract doesn't even name a price and just says 'in principle, we'll buy back the same amount within a year,' then JA is the only one who'll bid on that.
It's less that they 'bought it all up' and more that Etō and JA teamed up to control supply — which kept the pricey 2025-harvest rice they'd bought at high provisional prices from crashing.
so in the end it was just a spike that came back down
and because of that spike, producers can no longer absorb their rising costs
agricultural policy has just been incompetent
if they'd kept prices from swinging so wildly, they could've managed a gentle rise instead
next year's going to be brutal from the backlash
Pretty good odds that by next year's new-crop rice, cries of 'too expensive' will only get louder
and rice culture keeps eroding.
Exactly this.
TV and the rest of mass media keep saying prices 'fell,' but they're comparing to the peak of the price spike — of course it looks that way.
Wheat prices are up this year,
so like in 2024 when rice looked relatively cheap by comparison, rice consumption this year will probably rise.
The problem is on the supply side — production costs are climbing but prices aren't.
I bet output drops sharply next year.
Who knows what happens then.
Beat down JA and rice farmers until they say 'can't keep this up, we're quitting' — does it end in consolidation into large-scale corporate farming, or does a lack of flat farmland keep companies from moving in, leading instead to mass imports of California rice?
If scrapping tariffs means cheaper imported rice, that's great news for consumers!
Handing the country's staple food over to speculators — that's basically a nation of barbarians at this point.
I bet they made a killing off political donations.
'Protecting the farmers' was just a smokescreen slogan.
so give it ten years and they'll basically be wiped out.
This is exactly the moment I'd like to see them quit farming.
Compared to those years, I'd say it's still more than 30% higher.
Couldn't be helped back then, there was an election coming up. If there hadn't been an election, he wouldn't have brought up the 'elephant' either.
There's no time,
and production can't ramp up quickly anyway,
so alongside pushing to increase output,
(farm minister) Shinjiro released the reserve stockpile,
and as a result, rice finally started moving again.
— importing is cheaper.
Well, from the perspective of ordinary consumers who are stuck buying pricey produce because of tariffs put up for farmers' sake, farmers playing the victim is honestly grating.
Japan's serious farmers make their money off livestock, vegetables, and fruit.
Rice farmers are just numerous — mostly tiny-scale, weekend-only part-timers.
What's needed is a policy that pushes these inefficient part-time farmers out of the business.
Livestock farming isn't exactly 'serious' either —
it basically runs on tax money.
Huge facilities, huge machinery, all subsidized.
They get equipment bought outright with tax money that even big commercial farmers elsewhere don't have.
It's precisely because things got more efficient that people can go work outside farming lol
Feels like you've mixed up a bunch of unrelated info and landed on a weird conclusion, no? lol
Background and key points of this debate
The “Reiwa Rice Riot” refers to the string of turmoil in which retail rice prices spiked sharply through 2024-25, triggered by quality declines from summer heat starting with the 2023 harvest and by clogs in distribution. Provisional prices are the tentative buying prices JA pays producers in advance of final settlement, and serve as a gauge of that year’s market sentiment. This time’s “30-40% drop” is measured only against the inflated 2025-harvest prices — as some thread posters pointed out, the current level is actually close to 2023-24 harvest prices. Opinions split over whether to pin the blame for the price swings on JA and agricultural policy’s supply control, or on the structural shift of consumers away from rice; but on the point that farmers face rising production costs without a matching rise in sale prices, posters across the divide largely agreed in voicing concern about what’s ahead.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[Rice] 2026-harvest provisional prices down 30-40% across Tohoku — driven by inventory levels and the fallout from the “Reiwa Rice Riot”.”
