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To understand Japan's role in deflating the rice market, it helps to visit the warehouses rimming Tokyo Bay. It's here in temperature-controlled buildings that Japan keeps millions of 30-kilogram vinyl bags of rice that it imports every year. Tokyo doesn't need rice from the outside world: The country's heavily subsidized farmers produce more than enough to feed the country's 127 million people. Yet every year since 1995, Tokyo has bought hundreds of thousands of metric tons of rice from the U.S., Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Australia.Why does Japan buy rice it doesn't need or want? In order to follow World Trade Organization rules, which date to 1995 and are aimed at opening the country's rice market. The U.S. fought for years to end Japanese rice protectionism, and getting Tokyo to agree to import rice from the U.S. and elsewhere was long a goal of American trade policy. But while the Japanese have been buying rice from farms in China and California for more than a decade, almost no imports ever end up on dinner plates in Japan. Instead the imported rice is sent as food aid to North Korea, added to beer and rice cakes, or mixed with other grains to feed pigs and chickens. Or it just sits in storage for years. As of last October, Japan's warehouses were bulging with 2.6 million tons of surplus rice, including 1.5 million tons of imported rice, 900,000 tons of it American medium-grain rice.
Ist das nicht ein ungeheurer Schwachsinn? Dieser ganze Freihandels-Blödsinn ist echt nur noch eine Farce, besonders weil ja die USA auch massiv ihre Farmer subventionieren.