The protein system
Japan feeds 124 million people on 4.3 million hectares of farmland, down from 6.1 million at its 1961 peak. That is 0.0325 hectares of arable land per person, among the lowest of any large economy.[12, 15, 21] Protein supply is 77.1 grams per person a day,[22] modest for a G7 country and below the world average. Seafood still matters. Each person has 22.0 kg a year, well below the old peak.[23] Animal protein supplies about 7.6 per cent of the diet's energy.[24]
Japanese farms raise most of the country's meat, eggs and milk, but on imported feed. Counting everything raised on Japanese farms, Japan produces 65 per cent of its own animal foods. Counting only what is raised on Japanese-grown feed, the figure is 17 per cent. The gap runs through every product. Beef falls from 50 to 14 per cent, pork from 48 to 6, chicken from 64 to 8, eggs from 98 to 12 and dairy from 64 to 29.[1, 3] Rice is the only staple Japan grows almost entirely at home, at 99 per cent. Wheat is 16 per cent, soybeans 24 and seafood 47.[1]
The government measures self-sufficiency mainly in calories. Japanese farms supplied 860 of the 2,248 kcal available per person a day in 2024, 38 per cent, unchanged for five years. By value the figure is 64 per cent.[1, 2] On calories, imports are large but fairly spread. The farm ministry, , puts 23 per cent of supply with the United States, 12 per cent with Australia and 8 per cent with Canada, and 2 to 4 per cent each with Brazil, Malaysia, China and the European Union. By value, no foreign supplier exceeds 8 per cent.[1]
Durable domestic capacity:
Japan's fishing and farming are both shrinking. Fisheries and fish farms produced 3.63 million tonnes in 2024, the lowest since records began in 1951.[9] That is about 28 per cent of the 1984 peak.[10] Japan now catches or farms 52 per cent of the seafood it eats, and 62 per cent of the fish stocks assessed in 2023 were rated low.[8, 11]
Farmers are getting older and fewer. Self-employed farmworkers fell 25.1 per cent in five years to one million in 2025. Core farmers averaged 69.2 years old in 2024. Rice paddy fell from 2.11 million hectares in 1995 to 1.52 million in 2025.[12, 13, 14] Today's output figures make the farm base look more durable than it is.
Resource headroom:
Japan has plenty of water, 3,437 cubic metres per person a year, but little farmland.[16] Fish stocks are under pressure too, and fish farms import about as much fishmeal as Japan produces.[6, 8]
Japanese diets lean on seafood, pork and chicken more than beef, and beef eating is falling as prices rise.[7] Farming is intensive and depends on imported inputs. Fertiliser use was 202.8 kg per hectare of arable land in 2023.[20]
Water and credit are there to bring land back into use. 70.7 per cent of arable land has irrigation, so water is not what holds farming back.[41] Farm lending reached JPY 1.06 trillion in 2024, about five times its 2008 level, through the farm cooperative banks and Japan Finance Corporation.[42]
But there is far less spare farmland than the official figures suggest. Cropland and arable land have fallen every year since 2000, by 11.6 and 10.1 per cent.[41] In 2024, 257,000 hectares were officially classed as abandoned farmland, and only 94,000 hectares of it could be restored. Most of the 590,000 hectares taken out of rice went into other crops under a subsidy rather than lying idle.[43] The Farmland Bank aimed to have 80 per cent of farmland run by full-time farmers by 2023. The share reached 62.1 per cent in 2025, two years after the deadline.[43, 44, 45]
Import exposure:
Japan imports 62 per cent of its food calories[1] and most of the feed behind its meat, eggs and milk. Each product comes from fewer places than the overall total suggests. Maize, the largest import at 15.47 million tonnes in 2024/25, came about 86 per cent from the United States. Soybeans were 68.3 per cent American and 21.1 per cent Brazilian.[5, 6] Australia supplies 48 per cent of imported beef and the United States 35 per cent.[7] Pork comes from a wider spread: the United States, Canada and Spain.[7]
Two things reduce the risk. Most imported food and feed comes from the United States, Australia and Canada[1, 5, 6, 7] and crosses the open Pacific. None of it passes through Hormuz, Malacca, Suez, Bab el-Mandeb or the Bosphorus. The state also buys the five main types of food wheat itself. MAFF imports it and sells it on to mills at a price set twice a year, so the government directly controls 5.57 million tonnes of its most sensitive food grain.[5] The shipping routes do all meet in the Western Pacific near Japan, where one disruption could hit several suppliers at once.
Upstream dependence:
Japan imports its feed, fertiliser and energy, which leaves it more exposed than the Gulf states, which export fertiliser and have their own energy. Almost all of Japan's fertiliser raw material is imported, from very few places. In October 2024, 69 per cent of urea came from Malaysia.[25] In 2025 China supplied 92 per cent of Japan's diammonium phosphate.[50] Earlier figures from MAFF put nitrogen at 47 per cent Malaysian and 37 per cent Chinese, phosphate at 90 per cent Chinese and 10 per cent American, and potash at 59 per cent Canadian and 16 per cent Russian.[26] China now exports far less phosphate. Its exports fell from about 11 million tonnes in 2015 to about 4.5 million in 2025 as it kept supply for its own farms and battery makers.[52, 53] It stopped them altogether from December 2025 to August 2026,[51] leaving Japan to find another source for most of the year. Feed is 74 per cent imported, measured by nutrient content,[1] and the grain-based share is higher still. The energy that runs cold stores, greenhouses and the fishing fleet was 87.3 per cent imported in 2023.[17]
Japan does control two key inputs. It imports no live cattle.[7] About half the cattle slaughtered are Japanese Black, a breed Japan holds at home and restricts from export, so breeders control their own stock. Japanese crushers also supply all of the country's rapeseed meal and about half its soybean meal.[6] Japan owns the processing, even where it imports the raw crop.
Access and affordability:
Affording a healthy diet is the main concern. In 2024, 13.3 per cent of people in Japan could not afford one, more than in most G7 countries with similar incomes.[32] was 5.2 per cent in 2024, down from 6.9 per cent in 2008-09, but above Germany (2.2), Australia (3.1) and the United States (4.2).[34]
Food prices are stable over the long run, with inflation averaging 2.83 per cent a year since 1971.[35] But shocks at home can be sharp. Wholesale egg prices rose 72 per cent during the 2022-23 bird flu outbreak.[28] In March 2026 food prices were still 24.8 per cent above March 2022, even though world food prices had fallen 19.7 per cent.[46, 48]
Japan scored 3.9 out of 5 on the World Bank's 2023 logistics index.[36] When world food prices rose in 2021-22, they rose about 37.7 per cent in yen, but Japan's food prices rose only 4.9 per cent.[46, 47, 48] Prices of animal foods still swing. In 2025, medium eggs rose 33.9 per cent from their January low to their December high, and chicken breast prices varied by 46.2 per cent.[49]
Shock endurance:
Japan's public food stocks are modest. Its other buffers are money, legal powers and land that could switch to other crops. Stocks last weeks to months. The government rice reserve aims to hold one million tonnes, enough to cover two poor harvests in a row, and is topped up by about 200,000 tonnes a year.[5] Mills hold about 900,000 tonnes of imported food wheat, 2.3 months of use, of which MAFF pays to store 1.8 months. Another one million tonnes of imported feed grain is stored with state support.[5]
Japan has come through recent shocks at home without rationing, but at real cost. The 2022-23 bird flu season brought 84 outbreaks and the culling of 17.7 million birds, 16.4 million of them laying hens. Farm losses reached JPY 14.2 billion and state compensation JPY 16.9 billion.[27] The 2024/25 rice shortage led MAFF to release 590,000 tonnes from reserves, while private rice imports jumped 14,635 per cent to 88,706 tonnes.[5] Neither shock came from trade being cut off.
Paying for imports in a crisis is Japan's clearest strength. Reserves were about US$1.37 trillion in 2025,[19] enough for 14.0 months of imports.[37] Food is just 9.5 per cent of goods imports,[18] so Japan can outbid almost anyone for food that is available. In 2020 the state paid every resident JPY 100,000, about 42 per cent of a full-time worker's typical monthly pay, with no means test.[40] It was slow. The payment was announced in April and most households got it in late June or early July. A mid-June survey of 43 large cities found three had paid less than a tenth of their residents.[40] The payment reached everyone, but not quickly.
Against that, government debt reached 248.7 per cent of GDP in 2025, the highest of any rich economy. Japan's 2020 stimulus was billed at more than 50 per cent of GDP, but direct spending came to about 16 per cent, still the third largest in the G7.[38, 39] Japan can still borrow easily because almost all its debt is in yen and held at home. That strength rests on its reserves and its currency, not on room in the budget that it could keep drawing on.
A 2024 law gives the government step-by-step powers over food production and distribution in a crisis,[29] and the revised Basic Act makes food security a founding principle of farm policy.[30] Japan's farmland offers little extra protein in a crisis. MAFF estimates that switching to potato-based cropping could supply about 2,418 kcal per person a day, against about 1,755 kcal from rice and wheat. But potatoes supply little protein, and even that potential is shrinking as farm labour runs short.[4]
Trajectory
Japan now has stronger tools for food security. The revised Basic Act and the crisis law give the state legal powers it lacked in 2022.[29, 30] The 2020 Basic Plan set a target of 45 per cent calorie self-sufficiency by 2030.[31] Fertiliser policy aims to double the use of sewage sludge and compost by 2030 and to raise home-sourced phosphate to 40 per cent of use.[25] With China supplying 92 per cent of diammonium phosphate[50] while cutting its exports,[52] these plans reduce reliance on a supplier that is pulling back.
Feed offers the biggest chance to cut imports. Replacing a quarter of imported grain feed with Japanese grass, silage maize or feed rice would create demand for crops grown at home. The fertiliser plans could also reduce reliance on China.[50] But a farm workforce shrinking by a quarter every five years will make each change harder.[14]