Amid the global rice price crisis, which has seen a drop of 35% on international markets in just one year, and while major producers like Japan, India or the Philippines apply protectionist measures in a situation that … If analyzes predict that the situation will worsen in 2026, the European Union – or rather the Commission and certain countries – has decided that even in these circumstances, it will not limit the entry of non-Community cereals to zero customs duties. This was decided by the Community Executive, the European Council (the Member States) and the Parliament after a long three-way negotiation that concluded on Tuesday last week, with a result that meets the expectations of the purchasing countries – those of the north – but for the Spanish and Italian producers it means “a death sentence” according to the agrarian organization Asaja.
What was on the table was not the application of a general tariff on rice, but rather a escape clause; That is to say the establishment of a maximum threshold of imports from which to start imposing border taxes, with the aim of protecting European producers against a sudden drop in prices. The truth is that Spanish rice farmers have been demanding this mechanism for some time, but the Commission only opened itself to this possibility a few months ago, when the coincidence of the reopening of exports from India – after two years of self-imposed blockade by Bombay to stop the rise in prices in that country – and the good climatic conditions in Southeast Asia brought prices to the lowest levels of 2017.
Concretely – and more under pressure from some MEPs than on its own initiative – Brussels agreed to modify the so-called “Generalized System of Preferences” (GSP) – a special trade regime that eliminates customs duties for developing countries – in order to be able to apply exceptions in the event of oversupply.
The problem, in this case, lies in the relationship with Cambodia and Burmatwo nations which, thanks to this preferential framework, have become major producers, already contributing to a third of the imports of the Twenty-Seven (522,000 tonnes between January and August 2025). All this, at the cost of a collapse in prices in the Spanish countryside, which Asaja estimates to be higher than 15% since the beginning of this year, and which has endangered the continuity of the great rice-growing regions of our country: the Ebro Delta, the Guadalquivir marshes, the Valencian Albufera and Badajoz. According to Miguel Minguet, spokesperson for Asaja, in these circumstances “there is a real risk of abandonment of the harvestloss of surface area and irreversible economic damage.
An impossible limit
The threshold from which rates would be applied is well above the annual average of imports, making the mechanism useless
Logically, Spanish rice farmers welcomed the opening of negotiations between the three European powers to reform the GSP regime, but the final result is far from what they would have liked, even if it seems that Brussels has given in to their demands. On the one hand, the Commission has opened itself to the conversion into an automatic safeguard clause, which was one of the demands of agricultural organizations to guarantee that the application of customs duties is immediate as soon as a certain volume of imports is exceeded, without the need for heavy negotiations between States and with the Community executive.
However, at the same time, Brussels placed this ceiling above the 560,000 tonnes per yeara figure which is 200,000 tonnes higher than the average imports of the last ten years and which makes the mechanism useless. According to the Union of Trade Unions, the EU has agreed on a threshold which will only be applied “when it is too late”.
The good news for the sector is that the mechanism can be revised every year and the Parliament and Council still need to ratify it. However, the preliminary agreement does not leave much room for optimism since everything indicates that the interests of the purchasing countries have prevailed over those of the producers, and that the blocking minority led by Spain and Italy that some expected does not exist.
About The Author
