Whilst on a long car journey the other day, I was listening to BBC radio (I can’t remember now whether it was Radio 4 or the World Service, though I suspect it was the latter), when I heard a piece about a shortage of rice in Japan. I settled down to wait for the link to climate change, but it wasn’t forthcoming. What’s going on?

Having heard nothing more about it, I thought I would see if I could find out what the story is. It didn’t take me long to find an article that appeared on the Guardian’s website yesterday. The main headline seemed to fit the bill for what I regarded as the inevitable “climate crisis” angle: “Against the grain: as prices and temperatures rise, can Japan learn to love imported rice?”. However, the sub-title seemed to hint at a more nuanced story: “The political and cultural insulation of Japan’s beloved grain is falling apart, and experts warn the country’s relationship with the staple will have to adapt”.

Yes, the article does insert what is now an almost obligatory reference to adverse weather conditions (“Stockpiles, already depleted by record-breaking temperatures that affected the 2023 crop…”), but that’s just about all it has to say about weather or climate. It turns out that this is a story about protectionism, tight government control of rice stocks, soaring prices, pressure on household budgets, competition from abroad, panic buying in the wake of typhoon and earthquake warnings, and even demand from record numbers of tourists. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a shortage of rice globally, for suddenly Vietnam appears to be exporting four times as much rice to Japan as it did last year, South Korean rice is appearing on Japanese shelves, Taiwan’s exports to Japan are six times higher than in the first five months of 2024, and rice is even arriving in Japan from California. Stockpiled rice from harvests in 2020, 2021 and 2022 (which were presumably more than adequate) have also been released by the government.

Rice shortages in Japan, though, aren’t anything new. The article advises that there was a catastrophic crop failure in 1993. Wikipedia tells us that the 1993 rice shortage was “due to a record setting cold summer” that year, so they probably can’t blame it on climate change. Mind you, it does sound as though rice weather is like the porridge in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and has to be just right – too cold in 1993, too hot last year, both years saw crop failures. Then again, was the heat really the problem last year? The same Wikipedia article suggests that “There was a heat wave in 1994 where the rice yields recovered and by the end of 1994, the situation had been resolved”.

Another Guardian article last year again blamed the Japanese rice shortfall on hot weather last year and demand from tourists. That article inserted a new factor – changing diets that then changed back again, but after the agricultural damage had been done:

As diets in Japan become more westernised, demand for rice has fallen. Amid the country’s demographic crisis, lower rice prices have discouraged younger people from becoming farmers of the cereal, resulting in increasingly elderly growers and abandoned rice paddies giving way to nature and nearby wildlife, the Mainichi reports.

However, demand for rice rose to 7m tons between June 2023 and last month, up 100,000 tons from a year earlier and the first rise in 10 years. During the same period, foreign tourists more than doubled compared with a year earlier. Japan welcomed 17.78 million tourists in the first half of 2024, a million more than pre-pandemic levels, figures showed earlier this month.

And then I thought to myself that having first heard about the story on BBC Radio, there must also be an article somewhere on the BBC website. And it turns out that there is, from 21^st May 2025. By and large it confirms the stories that appeared in the Guardian last year and this, but then, comfortingly, normal service was restored:

The cost of rice is also soaring in South East Asia, which accounts for almost 30% of global rice production – economic, political and climate pressures have resulted in shortages in recent years.

Of course, absolutely no attempt is made to provide context or to explain how and why climate pressures have been a contributory factor in shortages in recent years. Indeed, thanks to the internet, it doesn’t take long to find an article from Thailand with the headline “Global rice production forecast for 2024/25 raised to record high. We also learn:

Global rice production for the 2024/25 season has been revised upwards by 3.1 million tonnes to a record 535.8 million tonnes (milled basis), nearly 3% higher than last year.

According to the Rice Outlook: April 2025 report by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), global ending stocks for 2024/25 have been increased by 1.7 million tonnes from the previous forecast, reaching 183.2 million tonnes. These stock revisions are largely concentrated in Southeast Asia, with upward adjustments for Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

India accounts for the bulk of the year-on-year increase in global ending stocks, with its reserves up by 1.5 million tonnes compared to the previous year. China’s ending stocks for 2024/25 are projected to remain unchanged at 103.5 million tonnes—the largest in the world—comprising 56% of total global rice stocks.

The report also highlights that global rice supplies for 2024/25 are projected to reach a record 715.3 million tonnes, an increase of 3.1 million tonnes from the previous forecast. This represents a year-on-year growth of 12.3 million tonnes and marks the second consecutive annual rise.

In other words, there is no climate change issue affecting rice growth, either globally or in south east Asia. For good measure, Our World in Data confirms that Japan’s issue is declining areas of land dedicated to rice cultivation, while rice yield per hectare in Japan has remained broadly constant over the last ten years.

I am perhaps being a little unfair, since apart from short (but apparently obligatory) references to climate change in articles produced by both the Guardian and the BBC, nobody is making a big deal about climate change in the context of this rather strange story. However, it’s worth making the point that economic, social, demographic, land use and other factors can often supply a more coherent story about issues such as this, with climate change trailing a long way behind (if it applies at all) as a factor. It certainly isn’t climate change “what done it”.

Footnote

The title to this article sprang to mind when I recalled my own visit to Japan, when I attended the football world cup there in 2002. At one England match a particularly (and by Japanese standards, unusually) portly security officer kept making an appearance on the terraces. Whenever he appeared, the England fans delighted in baiting him rather cruelly with a revised version of an old classic – “Who ate all the rice?”