Eyes on imports to fill the gap as rice crop comes up short

Australian-grown rice is set to dwindle from supermarket shelves by Christmas, with the harvest confirmed as even tinier than last year’s.

SunRice chairman Laurie Arthur. Picture: John Feder

Australian-grown rice is set to dwindle from supermarket shelves by Christmas, with a near-complete harvest confirmed as even tinier than last year’s and stocks still depleted by COVID-19 hoarding.

Laurie Arthur, the chairman of SunRice, which mills 98 per cent of Australia’s production, said the company was working on plans to import rice to make up the shortfall and ways to keep its two plants in the NSW Riverina going. “If we just continue to mill rice at the current rate, we will be out of Australian rice by the end of the year,” Mr Arthur said.

He told The Australian predictions of a crop well under last year’s 54,000 tonnes — which was previously the second-lowest since the 1930s — had been confirmed. “We have almost completed the harvest and as we predicted it will be even smaller than last year, around 43,000 tonnes,” he said.

Australia’s rice crop, the vast bulk of which is grown in the Riverina, averaged about 700,000 tonnes in recent years.

Severe drought, low water allocations for irrigators, and high prices for water on the spot market in the past two growing seasons had left SunRice running low on stock.

“In the past two years we have put together the second- and third-smallest crop in our history,” Mr Arthur said.

During the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, panic buying saw SunRice scramble to meet demand 250 per cent above normal orders. “We started running 24/7 to fill the demand,” Mr Arthur said.

 

The company was still operating above normal capacity, and SunRice was looking at importing options. SunRice has already reduced its employee numbers at its milling plants at Deniliquin and Leeton.

Good rainfall in some parts of eastern Australia and forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology raised prospects for greater inflows into the Murray-Darling and a potentially much bigger crop next year, Mr Arthur said.

However, early NSW government outlooks of the average probability of water allocations for irrigation were not encouraging. “On the basis of that, we won’t get a very big crop,” he said.

SunRice and irrigation farmers have called for water reform to secure more for agricultural production.