How Japan went from a rice shortage to a rice surplus in two years, as climate change, tourism, and a U.S. trade fight collided

In 2023, extreme heat and drought damaged Japan’s rice crop, and a year later, that damage turned into a national shortage so severe, it forced a government minister to resign. By 2026, Japan had swung so far in the opposite direction that it was sitting on a record surplus, forcing the government to buy rice back off the market to keep prices from collapsing further. It’s still a wonder to the people who study it: how on earth did Japan go from shortage to surplus in two years?

“Every expert is actually surprised by this fluctuation,” Ryosuke Inoue, a visiting fellow at the CSIS Japan Chair in Washington, D.C., told Fortune. Inoue, an expert in Japanese agricultural policy, said even he didn’t see the scale of the swing coming. “The supply-demand gap was there, but it’s not such a huge gap. It could happen, and it could happen also in the United States. But in the U.S., the price fluctuation is not so high.”

Let’s start with the shortage, which seems pretty easy to understand. (The answer is going to be climate change, which, after all, was also partially the answer for the incoming Parmigiano and Moroccan sardine shortage we’re inevitably going to experience.) Heat and drought in 2023 damaged rice during the grain-filling stage, cutting the amount that was deemed as sellable, top-grade rice. Simultaneously, a tourism boom and some panic buying after an earthquake warning led to increased demand.

As a result, private rice stocks fell from the normal range of about 2 million tons down to roughly 1.5 million tons, and the resulting shortage sent a five-kilogram bag of rice from about ¥2,000 ($13) in........

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