Compound and mixed feed production in Japan

The amount of compound and mixed feed production in Japan constantly stays around 24 million metric tons for the last several years, which suggests that domestic demand for compound feed has so far remained almost unaffected by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

We rely mainly on imported feed materials

Feed supply in Japan relies on imports for most of feed grains such as corn, sorghum, barley, wheat, which total about 13,000 thousand tons a year.
Corn imported mainly from the United States and Brazil accounts for 47% of compound and mixed feed material. Second largest is soybean meal (13%), the third is rice (5%).
Accordingly, substantial increase in manufacturing cost caused by price hike of corn and other imported feed materials, as well as high freight rates and weaker yen against US dollar, has been causing negative impact on both livestock and feed business in Japan.

Development of self-supplied feed materials

Our self-sufficiency rate for compound feed is just 13 percent, which means that, for 87 percent of the supply of feed materials, we depend on resources from abroad.

Rice is the only grain that can be 100 percent self-supplied in Japan.
In the last decade, under some specific government programs to promote diversification of rice production, we have remarkably increased the use of domestically produced rice as a raw material for compound feed.
Such development of new market for domestic rice has prevented paddy fields from being abandoned in the economically and socially declining countryside, and has highly contributed to land conservation and local revitalization.

Production by feed type

In the share of each type of feed products, those for layers and swine have the largest share, 23.4 percent each, followed by beef cattle, broilers and dairy cattle.

The Economic Partnership Agreement between Japan and the European Union entered into force in February 2019, following the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement which took effect in December 2018 among 11 Member countries.
With the United States, Japanese government signed a separate bilateral trade agreement which was brought into effect in January 2020.

All these trade agreements include deals regarding such farm products as beef, pork, and cheese. As all of these products are highly sensitive for our local economy, the Japanese government actually reluctantly accepted quite drastic tariff cuts and quota expansion.
Although they will be implemented in rather long period of from 10 to 16 years, it is certain that those sectors affected by the trade deals will increasingly face fiercer competition with imported foreign products in Japan’s food market.
It is therefore more than ever an important mission for Japan’s feed industry to constantly supply safe feed with good quality and high efficiency to help our livestock farmers enhancing their competitiveness in not only domestic but also foreign markets.

Compound and mixed feed production in Japan

Since September 2018, Japan has been suffering from an outbreak of classical swine fever, and the Japanese government began vaccinating pigs in October 2019. However, there are still sporadic outbreaks of classical swine fever on farms, and wild boars infected with swine fever are found throughout “Honshu,” the main island of Japan.
There is no case of African swine fever reported in Japan, but it has very widely spread from China and other South-East Asian countries to South Korea, a neighboring country of Japan although separated by the sea.
Our animal hygiene authorities and the related industries are on their highest alert, and the members of JFMA have been taking tightest sanitary measures on their plants. In the past some winter seasons, avian flu carried by migratory birds was also a source of serious threat.