Photo: Patrick Davenport at our stand, Summer Fancy Food Show, New York, June 2026.

Three days in Britain. Three days across the European Union. In Japan, three days at least and a week if you can manage it. A week in Sweden and Norway. Up to ten days in Germany.

That is how long a growing list of governments now want each household to last on what is already in the house, without shops, mains water or power.

Japan made its request on 2 November, the day its new national disaster agency opened. Britain launched its Be Ready campaign on 22 October, the first stage of a three-year push. Normandy put out its own appeal on 27 October after a run of storms.

Why now

The official statements are plainer than the headlines. Japan names the earthquakes it has planned for over decades: the Nankai Trough, a quake under Tokyo, the northern trenches, and an eruption of Mount Fuji. Britain points to last winter's storms and this summer's wildfires, which cut power, water and phone lines. The European Commission's list, published in March 2025, adds cyberattacks, disease and war.

"Facing a disaster of national proportions, everyone must save themselves," Japan's disaster minister Goshi Hosono said at the agency's launch.

None of the governments we read named a new threat. Britain's Defence Secretary put the mood as "alert but not alarmed".

Food prices sit in the background. Fuel and fertiliser have been expensive since shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was disrupted in early March, and the UN's food price index reached 136.0 in September, its highest since November 2022.

What goes on the shelf

Every list asks for the same two things: water, and food that keeps without a fridge.

Rice is the second one. A kilo of dry white rice holds about 3,650 calories, so three days of an adult's calories fit in a 2 kg bag.

Where the rice comes from

Cambodia has spent this year selling more rice to more buyers. In the first eight months it shipped 792,212 tonnes of milled rice, worth $464.1 million, to 66 countries and territories, through 61 exporters. A year earlier there were 51.

The Philippines, which Cambodia's agriculture ministry says is buying to strengthen its food security, is on course to take about 209,000 tonnes by December. The United States took nearly 10,000 tonnes in eight months, roughly three times as much as a year before.

In October the country passed a million tonnes in a single year for the first time, as we wrote then.

Our part of it

BRM Agro mills in Kampong Thom. We buy paddy from over 1,000 farmers and ship to buyers in the United States and Europe. The wet-season harvest runs from mid-October to December, so rice for next year's cupboards is being cut in the fields around our mill now.

A household that keeps a week of food is planning for the days it can't go out and buy more. Our rice traces back to the field and the farmer who grew it, so whoever opens the bag on a bad day can find out where it came from.

Somewhere this week a 2 kg bag is going to the back of a cupboard. With luck nobody opens it for a year.