SANTO DOMINGO — The Dominican government’s recent rollout of eight policy measures designed to address upheaval in the domestic rice sector, launched after the elimination of long-standing rice import tariffs, has been rejected outright by the country’s rice farming community, who say the plans contain no concrete solutions to the deepening crisis facing their industry.
Last week, rice producer representatives held a closed-door meeting with a high-level government delegation headed by Vice President Raquel Peña and Administrative Minister of the Presidency Andrés Bautista to discuss the new policy framework. But moments after the meeting concluded, Marcos Rodríguez, president of the National Federation of Rice Producers, made clear that producers had walked away with no actionable resolutions for the challenges facing domestic rice cultivation.
“Today, we return to our fields with no solution to the issues we have repeatedly raised for national rice production,” Rodríguez stated. He emphasized that domestic rice production is already in an extraordinarily vulnerable position following the tariff elimination, which opens the door to unfettered U.S. imports under a liberalized trade regime. Rodríguez warned that the free market access granted to U.S. rice threatens the livelihoods of 30,000 domestic producers and puts at risk more than 300,000 direct and indirect jobs tied to the local rice industry, while also eroding the country’s longstanding food security guarantees.
“We leave this meeting extremely worried. The announced measures do nothing to close the gap that would allow us to compete on a level playing field,” Rodríguez said. “We recognize the government needs to find a solution, whether through renegotiation of trade terms or policy adjustments to balance competition. But if U.S. rice is allowed to flood our open market without fair safeguards, our domestic industry will disappear entirely.”
Heraldo Suero, director of the Dominican Association of Rice Factories (Adofa), echoed these concerns, acknowledging that while some elements of the government’s proposal hold theoretical value, the core issue at stake is the Dominican Republic’s food sovereignty. Suero argued that the future of the domestic rice sector is a matter of national self-determination that cannot be sidelined for trade concessions.
“This is a process that requires new bilateral agreements that prioritize the Dominican Republic’s sovereignty over its rice sector, which is not up for negotiation,” Suero explained. He directly called on the United States to acknowledge that the future of rice grown on Dominican soil is a non-negotiable priority, noting that “the privilege we have secured over decades of preserving national food sovereignty is not something we can trade away in international trade agreements.”
Suero added that no existing policy proposal put forward by the government addresses the fundamental structural and trade asymmetry between the Dominican Republic and the United States, saying “there is no floor, no adequate measure, that can overcome the gaps in trade, production capacity, and productive structure that we face when competing with U.S. imports.”