Rice is Japan's only self-sufficient grain, but as the population shrinks and eating habits change, the annual demand for rice is decreasing by 100,000 tons per year. In order to boost consumption, some companies have begun to expand their efforts in product innovation and application fields. Let's take a look.

Recently, the reporter visited a newly opened rice shop in Osaka, Japan. Unlike traditional rice shops, which only sell local specialty rice, the main products of the store are rice biscuits, rice fruit snacks, brown rice noodles and other processed rice products. Among them, instant rice cooked by microwave oven is especially popular among young consumers. According to the manager of the store, young consumers tend to buy convenient, small and innovative products. To meet this demand, the store also introduced high value-added products such as bibimbap in small cups with various flavors, rice suitable for sushi, and rice that does not harden easily after cooling.

Resident of Osaka City, Japan: I usually eat more bread, because it is more convenient. I also want to convenient rice, recently like to buy hot can eat convenient rice.

In Japan, when new rice is released every year, the rice harvested in the previous year becomes old rice, and an excess of old rice will cause the price of rice to fall. At present, the stock of old rice in Japan has reached 760,000 tons, an increase of 80% compared with 2019 before the epidemic. In a bid to boost consumption, a Japanese company is developing bioplastics using poor quality old rice as well as discarded broken rice from food processing. By mixing some rice into oil to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 70 percent, depending on the proportion of rice, bioplastics are already widely used in products such as toothbrushes, cutlery, toys and plastic bags.

Japan a rice bioplastic production company CEO Kamegu Hito: From April this year, the Japanese government will implement a new law on environmental protection and plastic reduction, requiring a large number of hotels and other enterprises to provide toothbrushes to reduce the use of plastic, so recently there are a lot of companies to order and consult rice plastic.

In recent years, due to labor shortage, meager profits and other reasons, more and more Japanese farmers give up farming, resulting in increasing abandoned farmland, China's abandoned area has reached 430,000 hectares, equivalent to the size of two Tokyo, but there is still an imbalance between rice supply and demand. In order to avoid the rice price is too low damage to farmers' interests, Japan is through the policy control to reduce rice production, call on farmers to adjust the production plan, and provide subsidies to promote the conversion of feed rice.

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