American rice – typically overshadowed by corn and other major crops – is getting a more prominent seat at the table.
That was literally the case last week at a Cabinet meeting at the White House to unveil $12 billion in aid for farmers harmed by worldwide trade tensions and soaring production costs.
Meryl Kennedy, a business owner and second-generation rice grower from northeast Louisiana, sat next to President Donald Trump during the nationally televised discussion, giving her a prime opportunity to directly deliver the American rice industry's message that rival global producers' dumping of product into the country is severely undermining U.S. farmers.
“We’ve never seen imports this great,” Kennedy told the president. “Truly, this is a national security issue.”
Like growers of corn and soybeans, the two biggest U.S. crops, rice producers are dealing with surging costs of everything from fertilizer to tractors. Yet rice also is dealing with other countries flooding the market.
"Over the last decade, we've started to see more and more imported rice take over our shelf space," Kennedy, 37, the founder and chief executive officer of 4Sisters Rice, said in an interview with Agri-Pulse. "At the same time, especially since 2020, our input costs have just skyrocketed."
Alvaro Durand-Morat (UArk photo)U.S. rice farmers are expected to lose on average $364 per acre on this year’s crop, according to the trade group USA Rice. Meanwhile, planting costs are projected to exceed $1,330 per acre next spring, meaning a farmer with 1,000 acres needs to have $1.33 million handy after just losing $364,000 this fall.
Payment estimates
Rice farmers are seen getting the biggest bridge payment per acre out of nine row crops that include corn, soybeans and cotton, according to estimates from the University of Illinois on what the Trump administration aid might look like.
Growers of rice are estimated to get $134 an acre, adding up to $425 million for the sector overall, according to professors in the school's Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. Soybean payments are seen at $25 an acre, for a total of $2 billion.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said it will release specific payment rates for farmers next week.
While some of the current tariff fights between the Washington and countries like China have directly hurt demand for some U.S. crops like soybeans, the impact on American rice farmers primarily has been from the effect of higher levies on input costs like fertilizer, according to Alvaro Durand-Morat, a rice and trade expert at the University of Arkansas.
Further, India, which controls about 40% of the globe's rice shipments "keeps world prices artificially low because they subsidize the heck out of their exports," said Jack Scoville, an analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.
The U.S. South, led by Arkansas, farms mostly long-grain rice and is the country's largest producing region. California, the second-biggest U.S. rice hub, specializes almost exclusively in sushi-grade rice.
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Kennedy's journey to Washington last week began with a letter she and other Louisiana farmers sent to Trump about a month ago calling for universal tariffs. The aid announced by the Trump administration, along with key updates to safety nets enshrined into law earlier this year, will give growers a chance to make it to the next crop year, "but the situation is far from over," Kennedy said.
"The prices of rice have never been this low relative to the cost of production in my lifetime, and not even in my father's lifetime," she said, referring to 80-year-old Elton Kennedy, who is retired but still visits the farm daily. The market woes are hitting as U.S. demand for rice has stayed robust, with a growing Asian immigrant population and increasing popularity of rice-based dishes overall boosting consumers' appetite for the grain that serves as a staple food for over half the world.
The push for a universal and uniform levy on all rice imports from all origins coming into the U.S., as opposed to slapping on huge tariffs, is borne out of practicality.
"While there are maybe a handful of bad actors out there, they grow rice so widely throughout the world that if you were to put a high tariff on one country and not another that’s a neighboring country, you are going to see a lot of transshipments that aren’t necessarily traceable," Peter Bachmann, CEO of USA Rice, said in an interview. "We don't want to play whack-a-mole."
While the Trump administration is currently working on a trade deal with India, Bachmann said he's not optimistic that rice will be a high priority given that it's more of a long-term reform goal. A few years ago during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, talk of farm policy overhaul in India led to major protests and civil unrest.
"Rice in India is very complicate
Peter Bachmann (LinkedIn photo)d," Bachmann said, adding that in some ways it's like "corn or beef is to us here in the U.S. in terms of being culturally sensitive and something everybody knows and adores.”
The biggest U.S. rice import is jasmine, a fragrant variety popular to serve with dishes like curries, stir-fries and salads. Of the about $1.5 billion worth of rice shipped into the U.S. last year, 70% to 80% was jasmine. That's spurred tens of millions of dollars worth of research into how the U.S. can boost its own production.
"We think we have a suitable option of jasmine rice that consumers will like just as much as the Thai jasmine they’ve been buying," Bachmann said.
Durand-Morat said based on the current market challenges, there's real concern that in 10 years, the U.S. could become a net importer of rice.
Bachmann agrees. "That’s absolutely our fear."
"The only way for us to compete is through some sort of artificial intervention, and we see that as a tariff that would help make our prices more competitive, slow down imports and allow U.S. consumers, whether food service or actual retail consumers, to be able to switch to a U.S. version of what they’ve been buying," he said. "We grow a sufficient amount of rice in the U.S. to supply the U.S. market."
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