In many Asian countries, painstakingly inscribing individual grains of rice with minuscule letters is a traditional craft. Just imagine, therefore, what bu-reaucrats in such places can get up to when they have a whole crop to work with. Tariffs, quotas, floor prices, ceiling prices, producer subsidies, consumer subsidies, state monopolies-no measure is too meddlesome (see page 65). As a result, the market for rice is more distorted than that for any other staple. Rice growers pocketed at least $60 billion in subsidies last year, according to the oecd, twice as much as maize (corn) farmers, the second-most-coddled lot.
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