TOKYO, April 29, 2024—Perhaps a first confirmation of tightening food supply, decreasing production and the eventual acute shortages that Japan would run into over the next decade: OJ products are fast disappearing from store shelves as imports are dwindling and prices go sky high because of shrinking production in the United States and other exporting countries that are being ravaged by climate change.
The April 30 Japan Agricultural News daily reported that three top orange juice and product packaging and distributing companies – Morinaga daily, Meiji Meg Milk, and Asahi Beverages have been or planning to indefinitely suspend deliveries to retail stores. Morinaga sold Sunkist OJ and Meiji Meg Dole products.
Imports account for 9/10th of Japan’s orange consumption.
Morinaga and other companies are asking domestic citrus growers to increase production and harvesting, yet many growers are failing to respond because of aging – a classic pattern of Japan’s disruptive food supply chain.
A Nagano farmers market in central Japan April 1, 2024 newsletter for its member farmers said its business is poised to become unviable as the number of visitors has plunged to half in 2023 to 10,767 from 20,850 in 2013 as supply volumes and varieties of farm goods dwindle corresponding to farmer population aging, rising fertilizer, pesticide and insecticide prices, and stagnating selling prices. The market decided to close twice a week to cope with the situation but if conditions don’t turn around for the better, it could fold in less than two years, a market employee told The Prospect.
Production of most other crops is facing the same challenges. In Kitami, Hokkaido, farmers had quit growing sugar beets, and they now are growing only potatoes – a disease risk they decided to take to raise a single crop for lack of young labor and costs. ‘Potatoes are easy,’ a farmer told The Prospect April 29.
High value crops are what entrepreneur farmers are growing such as $20 a pop strawberries and $300 melons – arbitrarily contributing to Japan’s declining food production and supply.
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