Free Trade, Tariffs and Subsidies

We are all supposed to believe in ‘market forces’ now: unfettered competition, the perfect wisdom of the open market, and what politicians keep calling ‘a level playing field’. Chris Black, of the New South Wales Rice Growers, feels that his team is playing uphill and against the wind.

‘We are the last free traders of rice in the world,’ he told us. ‘When the USA and the EC take each other on in a trade subsidy war, we get squeezed in between them like the meat in the sandwich.’ Competitors in the rice trade had a score of ways of subsidizing their farmers: low-interest loans, cheap seed and chemicals, free water, guaranteed floor prices for the crop. All the Australians get is a funding programme for rice breeding and research; everything else they pay for, from irrigation to marketing.