What Japan’s Struggling Rice Market Teaches Us About US Tariffs

What Japan’s Struggling Rice Market Teaches Us About US Tariffs

Japan eats a lot of rice. And it imposes tariffs on foreign rice to protect domestic producers — sometimes as high as 700 hundred percent. The result has been a disaster for Japan’s rice industry: the opposite of what tariffs are supposed to achieve. In the early 1990s, Japan was forced to liberalize its rice market and did so reluctantly. But tariffs and subsidies designed to protect the domestic industry and keep prices high have instead corro…