He Dominican government studies what steps it can take to protect the national production of rice before the tariff reduction planned from 2025, a sector “essential for our economy”, according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Roberto Álvarez.
“The president will announce those steps in due course. He foreshadowed in his February 27 speech that there will not be a collapse in this sector, so fundamental to our economy. We’ll see what the measures will be,” Álvarez said in an interview with EFE on the occasion of the upcoming celebration of the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit in Santo Domingo.
The minister stressed the role of rice as “a part of the backbone of the Dominican food security“, because it is one of the products with the highest daily consumption in the country.
It is, he explained, a product of “high sensitivity” for the dominican economy:
- “Some 320,000 people work in the area (of them some 20,000 in direct jobs and 300,000 indirect), affects some twenty provinces of the country, produces around 26,000 million pesos per year (more than 475 million dollars at the current exchange rate) that move through banking, insurance, transportation”.
In his accountability speech before the National Congress on February 27, Dominican President Luis Abinader already announced the creation of a commission to initiate a process to protect the domestic rice productiondue to the tariff reduction that will begin in two years within the Free Trade Agreement (DR-Cafta) between the Dominican Republic, the United States and Central America.
Last Tuesday, Abinader He stated that his country will not allow the opening of the national rice market from the United States without tariffs.
“We are not going to allow the country to open up to the rice-producing part of USAa country that also subsidizes rice growers,” Abinader told reporters.
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This is an issue that is of great concern to the sector and, this very week, the Dominican Rice Union considered “necessary the definitive shielding of the national production of rice“.
He DR-Cafta was signed in 2004 and, in the case of Dominican Republicentered into force in 2007.
