With early shipments of rice from the 2025 harvest having reached the market, attention is turning to supply, demand and prices amid uncertainty over how this summer's extreme heat, water shortages and heavy rain will affect yields.
Competition to secure new-crop rice is intensifying, pushing up the provisional payments that agricultural cooperatives advance to growers in respective regions, with levels already well above those of a year earlier.
In the summer of 2024, rice was in extremely short supply in stores, and the quantities secured by major intermediaries such as the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations, or Zen-Noh, fell sharply. According to an agriculture ministry survey of the 2024 rice crop released in July, deliveries to major intermediaries were down 340,000 tons year on year.
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