I guess this is uplifting is you don’t have a rice farm…
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Capitalism makes this both uplifting and awful.
The article basically says Indonesia and the Philippines aren't importing any rice so the demand is way down, bringing the prices back to what they were at before the prices jumped apparently.
Way down is apparently around the price in 2022/2023
Isn't it more of a unplanned, free market problem? Related to capitalism (stock market), but not really capitalism.
Making a need a commodity is 100% capitalism.
I'm pretty sure every economic system will put a value on food
Having value isn't the same as exploiting value for financial gain.
The things I inherited from my grandpa are valuable.
0 chance I'd even consider selling them. I will be giving them away or willing them to people when I die/get older though.
well, he was more than a man
He was a union man.
lol even Marx and Engels in their manifesto cite this specifically as an example.
yeah i might be taking an L this year. i'd be happy for consumers if this leads to cheaper rice in grocery stores.
You've got jokes.
lol
Thats not how it works. In most eastern countries rice is heavily controlled and subsidized the same way we control mechanism dairy, corn, wheat etc. So its not pure market capitalism at play.
Even in countries where the government doesn’t do this, there are companies that buy “Future produce” to help farms mitigate risk. They say what their price for corn will be months before harvest, and even if a bunch of global events affect the crop’s price, the farm gets reliable income. They don’t get the windfalls of high prices, but they’re basically offloading the risk, like insurance.
Rice: Thrives even though humans are fucking the climate, the soil and the water it needs to grow.
Human: my money :(((
Rejoice motherfucker, we are still not at the point of no return.
If they want the government paying them for the bad years, then they have to want to not make bank on the good ones.
Does this imply that each farmer has a larger harvest also?
Good to hear. I don't see Japan mentioned in the article, hopefully this resolves their shortage.
I thought the issue was japan not importing rice, not necessarily a global shortage
Thought I read somewhere a long time ago that they imported a bunch of rice from the US as a result of some trade agreement. But they don’t want to eat the rice from the US because it’s lower quality. So it doesn’t get sold for human consumption. Though I guess they use it to make other stuff. Like you could ferment and distill it.
Iirc we use American rice in cheaper restaurants and donate it for himantarian aid overseas but I imagine not many people, myself included, would buy American rice at the grocery stores unless absolutely necessary.
They were using it for pig feed.
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Japan’s “rice crisis” is totally self-inflicted and very solvable.
At the cost of their domestic food security.
Did we not learn from the pandemic?
Japan has no domestic food security, it imports 60% of all food (one of the highest in the world btw) and it would be unsustainable any other way so it must have a strong trade policy. This makes the recent Japanese alt right moves all more idiotic.
Makes a lot of sense to try and preserve the remaining 40% then
How? The bottle neck is workable land not farmer incentive.
Farmers being 80 years old and young people moving to the cities doesn’t help.
Nor do the laws making it essentially impossible for foreign nationals to own and manage farmland.
Definitely. I lookup Japan's immigration programs every year and every year is not good enough for anyone worth their salt to bother, especially when compared to neighboring countries. Also the current political shift to right is a major red flag.
Correct. So that means the incentive would obviously be placed on higher value crops and not necessarily staple crops like rice.
That's a big problem for a nation's food security
JA has a tight grip on rice in Japan. Add to that the insistence of JP govt to not import rice in almost all circumstances and you can guess that the rice market in Japan is almost disconnected from the global rice markets
Cool, though I'm yet to see this in my own country. Here, the price of rice seems to be on an all-time high.
Eggs, though, are cheaper than ever, literally thrice as cheap as they were (winks to Americans)
Usually takes a while to trickle down to consumer level prices.
I checked current prices against my last order, 2 months ago, and I don’t see a price change on the bags of rice.
According to the chart in the article (which only discusses the price of one specific type of rice) almost all of the price drop occurred over 2024, and it's only dropped a little more throughout 2025 so far. Maybe compare to your rice order a year ago
20lb bags of jasmine rice.
2023: $16.97
2024: $16.97
2025: $18.55
The prices discussed in the article are wholesale commodity prices and do not reflect retail markups. The price you're paying accounts for transportation costs, store salaries, and much more, whereas the prices in the article is what rice farmers are selling for. Also, short term price fluctuations are unlikely to impact retail prices at all, where long term fluctuations may impact prices slowly over time, assuming retailers decide to pass cost savings on to customers at all
I can math, it’s always been an easy A. But economics twists my head. Half of it seems reliant on the neighborhood of make-believe and chaos. I believe you but I’m not going to pretend to understand it.
Incoming rice tariff…
Just in time for the subpar corn yields
Sooo... Consumer prices on rice products will come down then?
I understand the economic theory, I am honestly just a jaded ass at this point. It will be great if supply prices come down and restaurants don't pay as much for the rice, but consumer prices will always be downward inflexible, so they will just pocket the extra profit and we are still shafted. Some places may lower prices to attempt to compete more, but not by as much as their margins increase.
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