By Aya Takada
Aug. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Japanese rice production may drop 6.9 percent this year to 8.21 million metric tons, as cool summer weather curbs yield, a research institute said.
The average yield for paddy rice will probably decline to 509 kilograms for every 10 ares (0.2471 acres), down 6.3 percent from last year, Tokyo-based Rice Databank Co. said today in a statement. Rice-planted area is expected to fall 0.8 percent to 1.61 million hectares, said the institute, which correctly predicted the nation’s rice crop last year.
Japan, the world’s largest grain importer, is self- sufficient in rice as the government protects growers from foreign competition with a 778 percent tariff on imports. The nation imported 1.1 million tons of rice in the year ended March 31, 1994 and an additional 1.5 million tons in the following year after a cool, rainy summer damaged crops in 1993.
Japan agreed to give minimum market access to rice- exporting countries at the Uruguay Round of world trade talks, and is obliged to buy 770,000 tons this fiscal year. The government imported a total of 9.38 million tons of rice from April 1995 to March 2009 in line with the agreement.
Inventories of private and government domestic food rice will fall to 2.92 million tons on June 30, 2010, from 2.98 million tons a year earlier, the agriculture ministry said in a report on July 31. The total includes 860,000 tons held by the government, unchanged from a year earlier, it said.
Japan’s stockpiles of foreign rice stood at 1.11 million tons as of March 31, up from 970,000 tons at the end of last October, according to the report.
To contact the reporter on this story: Aya Takada in Tokyo atakada2@bloomberg.net
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment