May 30 (Japan Times) - Japan's potato chip fans recently went on a panicked buying spree as the country's snack food companies were forced to partially halt production of the favorite crisps.
But while this episode of food scarcity is not a food crisis, its cause - an unprecedented series of typhoons that destroyed domestic potato crops - is an attention-grabbing indicator of the need to improve food system resilience in the face of increasing climate change.
In August 2016, Hokkaido, the nation's northernmost island prefecture, was lashed by four typhoons. The resulting floods drastically reduced agricultural harvests, including the autumn harvest of a particular variety of potato used to make chips. Although potato chip production is slowly recovering with the help of other potato sources, this incident highlights one example of precarious risk management in Japan's agricultural supply chains.
Historically, Hokkaido has rarely experienced typhoons, but this is changing with new weather patterns including higher average temperatures, longer summer days, more rain and less snowfall. Because Hokkaido is home to nearly one fourth of Japan's arable land and is the country's leading producer of major agricultural products - including wheat, soybeans and potatoes - the prefecture exemplifies how the impacts of climate change could have profound consequences for domestic crop security.
So how is Japan's agricultural sector responding to the threat of climate change? The Agriculture, Forestry and the Fisheries Ministry set out its strategies in a "Climate Change Adaptation Plan" announced in August 2015. Recognizing that agriculture, forestry and fisheries in Japan "have been put at risk … due to large-scale disasters caused by record high temperatures, torrential rain and heavy snow," the ministry aims to implement several adaptation plans. Some of these tactics will expand research on, and dissemination of, adaptive technologies and new plant breeds that can cope with the impacts of climate change.
The agriculture ministry and other government-scale efforts are a crucial part of climate change adaptation in the agricultural sector, but through our research on "agrodiversity" at the United Nations University in Tokyo, we are finding that traditional wisdom also offers vital solutions.
