Well from where I sit, in Japan, there is plenty of food. Recently, I have been regularly travelling back and forth between Tokyo and suburban Nagoya and I can't find any evidence of a problem. Furthermore, none of my Japanese friends and colleagues (an admittedly unscientific sample) have heard of this. I'm not discounting the facts of the story, but the doomsday warnings seem a bit overblown.
First of all, the foods mentioned in The Age article, butter, breads, cakes, and meat, aren't fundamentally staple to the Japanese diet. At least not historically. Japanese even occassionally make fun of Westerners by joking that we smell like butter (which after years living here I daresay is somewhat true!) When I worked at Hitachi some 16 years ago, I had colleagues that were impressed that I ate bread for breakfast, as the concept was still a bit foreign to them.
I'd say that the Japanese public is more concerned about safety issues with food from China, which parallel a six-fold increase in food imports over the last decade. Recently, a scare relating to tainted dumplings from China, which may indeed have been tampered with in Japan, resulted in a massive drop in food imports from China. For example as reported here and here. This will probably sort itself out, but could have a short term impact on food availability and prices.
For the last decade, Japan has had a near deflationary economy. As a result food prices have been stable. As the economy now slowly begins to expand, certainly some prices may also begin to rise. The yen remains strong (at least compared to the US dollar) and savings rates are high. There is no crisis.
But the real issue is that Japan still tightly regulates and controls massive sectors of agriculture. A decade after significant global efforts to open up agricultural imports, rice is still some 4 to 5 times more expensive than global prices. Only about 8% of the Japanese rice market is imported, and most of this is warehoused and used for food aid, or making sake. More on this here. Furthermore Japan exports rice to China. Admittedly this is specialty rice and not that much overall, but how dire a situation is it if Japan is able to export a staple product?
More basically, liberalization of food imports and an end to subsidized farming that artificially raises prices would resolve the problem overnight, albeit at substantial pain to aging Japanese farmers who remain a powerful support bloc for the ruling Liberal Democractic Party. Thus don't expect change anytime soon. Japan has plenty of cash (due to a high savings rate) to weather a short term storm.
But here's a few things to remember when reading such news from Japan:
1) Like many countries, the agriculture industry is highly protected and subsidized. Any analysis of food trends needs to consider the impact of liberalization of agriculture as a potential solution.
2) There are vested domestic interests that oppose imports in favor of domestic subsidies. It isn't too far a stretch to say that some far-right elements might even be opposed to the changes in diet (more bread and meat) versus a more traditional Japanese diet (more rice, fish, etc. ).
3) Japan has an aging and potentially declining population, but a high savings rate and remains a net overall exporter. If Japan could sustain itself before, that certainly isn't going to change in the near term, even with rising prices.
I think Glenn Reynolds is right when he says: "This is getting a lot of (probably exaggerated) attention in the survivalosphere. Those folks are like Paul Krugman, having predicted 9 of the last 0 food crises, but the news story, at least, is real."
I'm not at all worried where my next meal in Japan is coming from.
Update: Thanks Glenn (Instapundit) for the link and welcome all! Feel free to look around!
Update 2: Not about Japan, and at the risk of asking the completely obvious, but where does (via Reuters) Chavez get off blaming food shortages on capitalism? The guy who couldn't keep basic staples on the shelves, even with massive oil money subsidies, is in no position to lecture anyone about how to feed the masses. That would be like like asking Zimbabwe's Mugabe about how to tame inflation! Perhaps it is to be expected that Chavez would mouth off like that. But does Reuters really need to report on it quite so prominently, as if Chavez is making some insightful comment that somehow passed everyone else by? Yeah I know, I really shouldn't be surprised about Reuters' reporting either. . .
Update 4/24/2008: There was plenty of food at this restaurant in Chita Handa owned by a former sumo wrestler. Lots of chanko nabe (that's what sumo wrestlers eat to bulk up) and beer served by the liter!
