The government on Monday began auctioning off 150,000 metric tons of its emergency rice stockpile to distributors nationwide in an unprecedented move to lower the price of rice, which has been on the rise since last summer.
Rice from the stockpile is expected to hit shelves from around the end of the month to the beginning of April.
Of the 210,000 tons of rice it plans to sell to distributors, 60,000 tons are scheduled to be released in a second round at a later date.
Distributors around the nation who fit the criteria — those who purchase more than 5,000 tons of rice per year and have a distribution plan set — made their bids by Monday morning. The rice will then be auctioned off among them in the order of the highest bid, to be decided by next week.
The government decided last month to release rice from its stockpile — usually saved for emergencies such as extremely poor harvests or natural disasters — amid unusually high prices for the staple grain in the country caused by intermediary companies creating a bottleneck in supplies.
This is the first time in the nation’s history that the stockpile was released solely to bring down prices. Past examples of other releases include after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami and the 2018 Kumamoto earthquake.
With the release, the ministry hopes to bring down the prices, which have been increasing since the nation experienced a rice shortage last summer.
More rice is being produced in the country, with 180,000 tons more produced in 2024 compared to the previous year. However, speculative buyers looking to capitalize on last year's temporary scarcity of rice and the subsequent dissonance in the supply chain have kept prices high.
“I think it is an extremely irregular situation,” agriculture minister Taku Eto said at a session of the Upper House Budget Committee on Monday. “We are making 180,000 tons of extra rice, and we have enough in stock. If you go to the supermarket, you can find rice. But the price is abnormally high — it’s double the price.
“Since we are releasing 210,000 tons, if the policy is not effective, we will release more,” he added. “We will do our best to resolve the bottleneck in the distribution chain and alleviate the struggles of consumers.”
According to the farm ministry, the average price of 5 kilograms of rice at supermarkets was ¥3,939 ($26) at the end of February, compared to around ¥2,000 the year before.
Following the severe rice shortage that the country experienced in 1993, the government implemented a system in 1995 where it stockpiles around 200,000 tons of rice each year and keeps it for five years in preparation for emergencies. This means the government always has 1 million tons of rice in storage on any given year.
In January, the government revised guidelines on when the stockpiles could be released to include times when “smooth distribution is interfered with,” in addition to times of poor harvest.
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