Is Japan Starving?

[GlorifiedRice]

Hi,

In my politics chat someone said Japan is starving and theres big food shortages and butter is gone from mkts...

Is this true?

[Route246]

Japan is hardly starving and butter is not that popular in Japan. Rice may come under pressure but since it's a protected industry it's highly unlikely.

Hi,

In my politics chat someone said Japan is starving and theres big food shortages and butter is gone from mkts...

Is this true?

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[SuzySushi]

Here's a link to an article from an Australian newspaper. "Starving" is quite a bit overstating it. Japan, like other nations, is facing higher prices for wheat and other international commodities. The costs of food (and of producing food) are going up, and certain foods (yes, like butter) are in short supply. The article goes on to say that Japan needs to take this as a warning to become more self-sufficient in producing its foodstuffs, instead of relying so much on imported foods for its increasingly "sophisticated" diet.

[Hiroyuki]

The Japanese may be starved to death in years to come unless appropriate measures are implemented now. Japan's food self-sufficiency was 39% in 2006, and is still decreasing.

As for the present butter shortage, it's because some people are buying it up before the prices are raised.

[buffy]

As for the present butter shortage, it's because some people are buying it up before the prices are raised.

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my local supermarket hasn't had butter for weeks. it is beginning to piss me off. have had to go to upscale markets and either get French butter or top quality Japanese butter like the Trappist butter from Hokkaido (delicious but not cheap).

[Paola Mannaro]

Hello World ! NO Japan is not starving ! However, if you want to send any (gourmet) food parcels I can provide my address.

On a more serious note : there have indeed been BUTTER shortages for some weeks already which continue. In Tokyo I had been buying French (imported) butters like Echire which retail at around 1400 Yen for 200g - almost 14 USD.

Since I found that Hokkaido butter tastes just fine I switched; but within weeks of this decision the Japanese (Hokkaido) butter started to disappear from the shelves. I thought it was a ploy to force the sale of the expensive imported brands but NO. The butter shortage was confirmed by The Japan Times.

The shortage was preceded by an increase in the cost of milk but has not been accompanied by any milk shortage - which begs the question : WHAT are they making their butter from exactly ?

Although the rest of Asia is suffering from a scarcity (and therefore increased cost) of RICE Japan is sailing through that crisis by eating - you guessed it - European breads and patisserie. I believe we are completely untouched by the rice shortage. Amazing.

To summarize : Supermarket shelves are packed, there is SOME evidence of butter shortages but I am able to obtain it easily from my local grocer. Both I and the patissiers of Tokyo are not experiencing ANY difficulties with butter or anything else. Unless you want to talk about overcrowded trains... Thank you for caring about Japan !

[helenjp]

Not starving, supermarket shelves are groaning as usual, but as Hiroyuki says, there are serious issues which seem to be getting the "elephant in the room" treatment.

Food prices have been going up steadily over the past year. There are all sorts of contributing factors:

1) General anti-China scare, partly seems to be copied off US moves to avoid Chinese manufactured goods, but in Japan, it also affects high import level areas such as fresh vegetables. This has peaked again with the pesticide-contaminated frozen gyoza (possibly sabotage) problem of a few months back.

2) Biofuel-"fueled" price rises, as in other countries.

3) Pressure from popularity of non-rice based Shochu ( distilled rice liquor), especially barley and sweet potatoes.

4) Milk shortage, yep, there really is one. Government "recommendations" led to downsizing of "excessively large" herds, unfortunately the demand for fresh milk (not reconstituted from powder etc) and other dairy products, coupled with a swing away from imports, has led to a sudden shortage of domestic milk, most of which goes into producing fresh milk rather than butter.

Cheese is less affected, because it seems to be considered more acceptable to import cheese!

Butter is back in my local shops this week, but limited varieties and quantities, and higher prices.

5) Almost all foodstuffs subject to government control of prices have gone up or are about to go up, in some cases very sharply. Few of these increases are less than 5%, and some are 20-30%, and this is the 2nd or 3rd round of increases over the past 6-12 months for many products.

6) Increasing affluence in the region means that Japan is no longer the only buyer, and poor harvests have accentuated this competition, which I suspect Japanese importers have not really adjusted to.

7) Ever since the rice panic that ensued after a poor rice harvest back in 1993s, there has been remarkably little public or media mention of harvests or the impact of typhoons, cold weather etc on crops. When Chinese vegetables become politically sensitive, suddenly everything in my supermarket has a Japanese place-name on the label. Nobody mentioned last year's rice harvest, yet I see more old/new rice blends for sale than usual. Unfortunately, this lack of discussion means that urban Japanese don't get a realistic idea of Japan's current food supply.

8) Self-sufficiency - some of Japan's lowest areas of self-sufficiency are in staples such as soybeans. I feel that the curiously high prices of Japanese rice rather than the much-touted "western tastes" have driven modern Japanese to eat more bread and noodles, and of course, Japan is much less self-sufficient in wheat than in rice.

[v. gautam]

Slightly off-topic but not really, when you add up this

http://www.axilltv.com/at/news.php?id=2047

plus this

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JD22Ad02.html

we find that certain mineral fertilizers central to rice farming will be becoming sharply more expensive over the coming year(s), up from USD250 to 650 now and no end in sight. These potash minerals also are central to many chemical industries and will affect export earnings as well.

As a result, rice prices in Japan may be expected to rise sharply in the future along with those of horticultural products like strawberries produced in hydroponic culture. Vegetable prices in genera will also rise, as will fruit produced in-country, all high consumers of potash. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants particularly!

Three countries contain most of the world's exportable potash: Canada, Russia & Belarus. Everyone else has to scramble for the same limited deposits. Phosphates share a similar story, concentrated in just a few spots in the world in exportable amounts.

This is not scare-mongering, but goesto emphasze that our presnt systems of agriculture are too wasteful of resources. The term "productivity" is consistently confused with "yield" whereas it is a function of yield as well as the the efficiency with which inputs are utilized.

Cropping systems and cropping patterns are unsustainable in all parts of the US, China, South Asia, Brazil etc. The public has grown inured to hearing this, but rarely has it chosen to become well-infrme about this most vital area affecting lives and the political economy of nations: oil, Iraq, plummetting dollar ad its faiure as a fiat currency lop back into global unres caused by agricultural systems long out of kilter.

Unless people decide to grow their attention span to grasp these serious interlinked issues in the depth they require, we all shall permaently remain in the thrall of sensation mongering rascals, be they politicians, or absurd elements like the Slow Food movement that cater exclusively to the extremely wealthy.

One example:Without understanding what GMO is, what the different types are, the pros and cons, how and who could misuse them, we have blanket sloganeering because it is convenient, emotive, simplistic and serves all manner of personal agendas.

Edited April 23, 2008 by v. gautam (log)

[JasonTrue]

Starving, surely not, but a number of people here and elsewhere have reported shortages of butter.

How the izakaya staples of renkon butter, jaga-butter and corn butter will survive, and thousands of French-style bakeries will fare, I don't know. But lack of butter, popular but not even remotely a staple item for Japanese, does not mean starvation... We had a similar shortage about 3 years ago in the US and it just meant prices went up.

Edited to add: Oops, my view somehow got switched to threaded, so I didn't see there had already been several replies.

Hi,

In my politics chat someone said Japan is starving and theres big food shortages and butter is gone from mkts...

Is this true?

←

Edited April 23, 2008 by JasonTrue (log)

[JasonTrue]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/business...ml?ref=business

Pricing pressure on rice (in the US)... Probably the same forces that led wheat prices to roughly triple in the last year or two.

[MoGa]

As a result, rice prices in Japan may be expected to rise sharply in the future along with those of horticultural products like strawberries produced in hydroponic culture. Vegetable prices in genera will also rise, as will fruit produced in-country, all high consumers of potash. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants  particularly!

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This leads me to suspect that there will be a shortage of reasonably priced Japanese Christmas Cakes, either in this or in the coming years.

Perhaps now is the time to develop and start marketing alternatives suitable for the Japanese palate (British style Christmas puddings and dried fruit cakes in marzipan and icing are too rich and sweet). Spanish food is currently en vogue and out of the confectionery that gets marketed as 'turrones' at Christmas, 'turron de yema tostada' could do well as a Christmas time wagashi-style sweet, it just needs to be portioned and packaged appropriately (Turrones 1880 have individually wrapped yema tostadas now).

Edited April 24, 2008 by MoGa (log)

[nakji]

I went to three different supermarkets at Yokohama station today looking for butter, and could only find Lurpak butter for 1400 yen. I thought it was bad two weeks ago when I was buying Japanese butter for 600 yen. I used to buy the Hokkaido brand butter, but I can't even find that now, and I've looked at every major station from Odawara to Yokohama. I consider rice a luxury ingredient, it's so expensive (compared to what I'm used to in Canada) so now I don't know what to cook anymore.

[v. gautam]

Just my opinion: Japan always believes itself short of "cultivable/arable" land although it has a very large percentage of land cover under forest, waste and mountain slopes. Some or even a great deal of this is amenable to producing food: not neat rice paddies, but excellent quantities of sheep milk, smaller cattle like Japanese and Dexter for milk, goat for milk and meat, llamas for meat and fiber, millets and a great many fruit and vegetables.

Rice and fish are very recent additions to the diet of Japan or at least the Japanese masses, from a historical perspective. Her mountains and uplands have fed and housed her children throughout history far more munificently than has the oceans, save for the littoral peoples.

We have an aging population clustered around too few mega-centres, such that these types of farming becomes less remunerative. Much worse, and forgive me for expressing an unwelcome opinion, we have a nation of heroes shackled by all manner beliefs self and other imposed post 1945 so that the very idea of breaking out of conventional molds seem horrific, even sinful TODAY. And this from a nation whose extraordinary capacities for change and adaptation point to equally extraordinary qualities of the soul.

I have a huge personal debt to Japan that can never be repayed. My great uncles and uncles involved in actively opposing British power in India fled to Japan around 1908. Some married Japanese ladies and stayed on, some kept fighting every day of their lives until freedom was won. But from them I got a glimpse of the changing Japan 1908-1970, the struggles, the sheer effort put in by each citizen. I hate to see a Japan made subservient to any other power, the role she has chosen.

So also with agriculture, Japan can easily break ree of sel-imposed shackles if she so chooses. She has the second highest balance of trade surplus in the world today and now is the time to invest in the future, keeping her interests foremost, not the USA's not anybody else's. Just a se did dring the Meiji era. This is bounteous land, but not made for rice or flatland agriculture for the most part. Its ancient monks were yamabushi, the new farmerswil will be a bit like them!! And the changing agricultural horizon will have to recognize this yama-factor, which has been ignored so far. Hence the ruinous costs.

P.S When I see Hiroyuki-san'son with his love for mushrooms and sansai and his keen scientific interest in plants, with his honored grandfather's influence, I think to myself, maybe here is the coming generation of yamabushi scientific farmers who will understand how to nurture Japan's mountain slopes without harming and produce healthy food at much lower cost than the present. That One Straw Revolution guy is sheer nonsense for the real world of producing food for 100 million people: we need real scientists, deeply learned.

[MoGa]

Just my opinion: Japan always believes itself short of "cultivable/arable" land although it has a very large percentage of land cover under forest, waste and mountain slopes. Some or even a great deal of this is amenable to producing food: not neat rice paddies, but excellent quantities of sheep milk, smaller cattle like Japanese and Dexter for milk, goat for milk and meat, llamas for meat and fiber, millets and a great many fruit and vegetables.

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I've not tasted llama so can't comment, but encouraging the majority of Japanese people to eat sheep and goat milk and meat as well as millet (a grain that was almost universally loathed when it was a staple - and still is by many with Chinese backgrounds) would be a tremendous feat.

I think your vision of a future Japan is just as dependent on dedicated 'yamabushi consumers'. After all, it's in the National character to adapt in the face of adversity, if my grandfather-in-law could survive solely on a diet of durian then millet polenta with goats cheese should provide no problem for his descendants.

For the less determined there's always buckwheat, a crop traditionally used in China as a means to ward of famine, perhaps in the future you've painted soba with sansai will replace sushi as Japan's most celebrated national dish.

[shinju]

Besides butter, are you seeing any food hoarding by consumers in Japan?

I'm beginning to read some rice and flour hoarding by businesses in the US. Not sure if this is true with consumers yet.

[Hiroyuki]

Besides butter, are you seeing any food hoarding by consumers in Japan? 

I'm beginning to read some rice and flour hoarding by businesses in the US.  Not sure if this is true with consumers yet.

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No, butter is the only food item that we have suffered shortages of so far.

As for rice, Japan is self-sufficient in it. Current increases in imported wheat flour have made domestic wheat flour and kome ko (rice flour) increasingly popular.

[JasonTrue]

I think lamb and sheep's milk consumption has actually declined in Japan... Hokkaido used to have dramatically larger herds.

Historically, my understanding is that mountain people had a larger dependency on hunting (birds and rabbits, among other things) and foraged items. I'm not quite sure how much actual cultivation happened in the mountains, but probably roots and tubers (konsai) figured into the diet much more than now.

[Pouncy]

My cooking students have commented that butter is hard to find because of herd downsizings - I buy butter on base, shipped in from the US so I've not had a problem.

[Hiroyuki]

My cooking students have commented that butter is hard to find because of herd downsizings - I buy butter on base, shipped in from the US so I've not had a problem.

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Right! I was wrong when I made my last post here. In 2006, there was a glut of raw milk in Japan, and producers have reduced the number of cows since then. Coupled with the fact that the consumption of raw milk has increased in China, India, and other countries, there are now shortages of raw milk in Japan, which is the main reason for the current shortages of butter.

[helenjp]

Mountain food - it's worth remembering that the hunter/gatherer society in Japan was ethnically different from the later agricultural Yayoi society. So suggesting that modern people "go back to" a pre fish/rice diet is problematic, and in no way adequate to sustain Japan's current population levels.

Some people say that most yamabushi tales are a romanticized version of the Jomon people who were driven into the mountains - certainly yamabushi were often seen as scary, just like the mountains they came from, and you can imagine why mountain food has been adopted only in a low-key way by the agrarian majority population.

There are good reasons why rice became so popular in Japan - it's one of the few cereals that can withstand high aluminum levels in Japan's volcanic soils, and those same high aluminum levels (if I remember correctly) keep certain plant diseases at bay. So switching to other forms of agriculture or other crops would not be easy - even if the oft-heard tale of the beneficial nature of paddy cultivation is not entirely accurate (rice paddies are second only to cattle-raising as an agricultural source of methane!).

Japan's native vegetable plants are very few, and remain close to their parent forms, showing their hunter/gatherer origins as clearly as the highly bred imported plants such as rice or brassicas show their agricultural origins. Very likely, none of the "5 cereals" are native to Japan either, with the possible exception of a wild strain of hie (e. crusgalli), which is only marginally cultivated. Apart from being stigmatized as "peasant food" the less popular grains are mostly not as high yielding as rice, though they can be cultivated in some places where rice is hard to grow.

The kind of forests that support Japan's wild foods have been much reduced by forestry plantations, and the river valleys needed for rice cultivation have been hugely reduced by urbanization. Mountain paddies are only a small part of Japan's ricelands, and were reduced first by mulberry cultivation, and then to urbanization and forestry/crops such as tangerines.

During the Edo period, when Japan was self-sufficient under the classical diet, there were quite a number of severe famines - but at least these were mostly local. With Japan's current dependency on imports (especially for staples, and especially because of extensive reliance on single countries for certain vital food products), disruptions to food imports now would have nationwide impact, and sadly, much of the land that once supported Japan is no longer usable for agriculture. Marginal land in colder areas such as Hokkaido or in mountain areas is no replacement for the rich alluvial land that has been lost.

Most lamb eaten in "traditional" Hokkaido Genghis Khan restaurants is from China or New Zealand. As cultivars suited to the colder climate and different Hokkaido soils were developed, rice cultivation has grown, as has cultivation of other crops such as potatoes or onions. However, moderate yields of rice in Hokkaido are no substitute for the higher-yielding cultivars double-cropped in warmer areas.

Although Japanese rice prices are so far fairly stable despite rising prices elsewhere in the world, I can't help wondering if extensive regulation of the rice market and prices since WWII is partly responsible for driving the current young adult and adult generations away from rice as a staple food, and for driving farmers away from specializing in rice production. Over recent years, Japan has produced only around 14% of the wheat that it consumes annually - a shockingly low amount when we consider how many people eat bread (pastries, cakes), udon, or ramen every day - not to mention tempura or other battered and fried goods. For soy, the proportion hovers around 3%. I believe these figures are calculated on a calorie base.

Fish prices have been manipulated to high levels (I know of catches being discarded to avoid lower prices), and so people turn to cheap pork or chicken - but only something like 5% of the pork eaten in Japan is raised on domestically-produced feed.

Overall, Japan produces (I don't think this figure is adjusted to account for foreign/domestic sources of feed, fertilizer etc) about 40% of its food on a calorie base, and 70% on a monetary base.

It's worth remembering that as the proportion of single households grows (among middle-aged and elderly, not just the young), the proportion of "classically Japanese" family dinners being prepared every day will also drop, making this reliance on imported staples even more shocking.

Considering the difficulty of abandoning rice as a staple food in Japan, it's a situation which deserves action rather than handwringing.

[nakji]

Considering the difficulty of abandoning rice as a staple food in Japan, it's a situation which deserves action rather than handwringing.

What could be done to improve the situation?

Coming from Canada, I'm already surprised at how even the smallest corner of suburban developments in Japan has a little garden patch given over for vegetables for the locals to buy. Outside of a few months in the summer, everything I consumed growing up came from California, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa...I never gave too much thought to Canada depending on the produce of other countries for survival.

I found some butter at a supermarket finally, and paid 600 yen for it. I've been looking in almost every supermarket I go by, and the butter section, always pretty small to begin with, is completely empty. It's hard, because I can't abide margarine, and I still use butter as a staple for breakfast and for cooking. We used to go through about 200g a week between the two of us, but now we're really eking it out. Pretty soon I'll be reduced to buying the 2,000 yen imported Camargue butter at the Seijo Ishi. Oh well - I guess I was waiting for an excuse to try it out anyway !

[prasantrin]

I found some butter at a supermarket finally, and paid 600 yen for it. I've been looking in almost every supermarket I go by, and the butter section, always pretty small to begin with, is completely empty. It's hard, because I can't abide margarine, and I still use butter as a staple for breakfast and for cooking. We used to go through about 200g a week between the two of us, but now we're really eking it out. Pretty soon I'll be reduced to buying the 2,000 yen imported Camargue butter at the Seijo Ishi. Oh well - I guess I was waiting for an excuse to try it out anyway  !

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I was at the Seijo Ishii in Umeda on Tuesday, and regular Hokkaido butter was Y298 for 200g, limit 3 per customer. They were sold out of the domestic butters that were between Y300 and Y400 per 200g (I can't remember the brands).

[nakji]

The Seijo Ishiis on our line have been completely ransacked and the only thing remaining is the French stuff. My husband got the last of the Hokkaido specialty butter at Ofuna station. I guess I'm going to lose a lot of weight this spring.

[Hiroyuki]

Slightly off-topic, but let me just say that after the World War II, the GHQ attempted to change the palate of the Japanese, feeding children with bread and milk. They never succeeded.

[insomniac]

Slightly off-topic, but let me just say that after the World War II, the GHQ attempted to change the palate of the Japanese, feeding children with bread and milk.  They never succeeded.

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that's interesting Hiroyuki, I wonder what was the reasoning behind that strange attempt??