Japan won’t sacrifice its agricultural sector as part of its tariff talks with the United States, its top negotiator says, after President Donald Trump complained that the key Asian ally isn’t buying American rice.
Trump’s comment, made in a social media post on Monday, comes as Tokyo scrambles to convince the US to scrap a 25 per cent tariff on Japanese cars and a 24 per cent reciprocal tariff on other Japanese imports.
The reciprocal tariff has been paused until July 9, but Japan has yet to secure a trade deal after nearly three months of negotiations.
While the auto sector is Japan’s top employer and exporter, the farm sector has traditionally been an important voting bloc for Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party, which faces key upper house elections on July 20.
“I have repeatedly stated that agriculture is the foundation of the nation,” top trade negotiator and Economy Minister Ryosei Akazawa told a press conference on Tuesday.
“In negotiations with the United States, our stance remains unchanged: We will not engage in talks that would sacrifice the agricultural sector,” he said, adding that he would continue to negotiate with his US counterparts to protect Japan’s national interests.
Akazawa, who returned from his seventh trip to Washington a few days ago, declined to say whether rice was part of those discussions.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that Japan’s reluctance to import American-grown rice was a sign that countries have become “spoiled with respect to the United States of America”.
“I have great respect for Japan, they won’t take our RICE, and yet they have a massive rice shortage,” he wrote.
Japan has in fact imported historically high volumes of US rice in recent months as domestically grown rice has skyrocketed in price since last year, hurting consumers.
But Tokyo caps tariff-free imports of staple rice – which is consumed at meals as opposed to rice used for feed or ingredients in other products – at 100,000 metric tonnes a year and imposes a levy of 341 yen ($2.37) per kg for anything beyond that. That amount is a fraction of Japan’s total annual consumption of about seven million tonnes.
While Farm Minister Shinjiro Koizumi has lamented the influx of foreign rice as a threat to Japan’s food security, the government has brought forward a tender usually held in September for this year’s first 30,000 tonnes of tariff-free staple rice imports as part of efforts to lower domestic prices.
with AP
Australian Associated Press is the beating heart of Australian news. AAP is Australia’s only independent national newswire and has been delivering accurate, reliable and fast news content to the media industry, government and corporate sector for 85 years. We keep Australia informed.
