Natto Bachao!

"Food Crisis - Save Natto!" - this was the title of a presentation given by a classmate at UNU today.

Natto is traditional Japanese food made from fermented soya beans. Ibaraki prefecture is well known for it.

I'm not too sure if the data was reliable but it was interesting to know that only 5% of Natto consumed in Japan is made from domestically grown soybeans. Most of the beans is imported from USA (71%) and Brazil (13%) and Canada (7%).

Apparantly 4.4 billion packs of Natto is consumed every year in a country of 0.1 billion people.

However, a lot of questions came up from this presentation - What is the volume / value of soyabeans imports to Japan? How is it that imported soyabean is kosher for the Japanese when they are so touchy about rice imports?

The answers, unfortunately, were not too convincing.