Details of 1993 GATT Trade Talks on Rice Revealed; Miyazawa Told Clinton Yielding Would Cost LDP Elections

The Yomiuri Shimbun

21:00 JST, December 26, 2024

A diplomatic document released Thursday reveals details of an exchange between Japan and the United States during the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1993, with Japan working to avoid full acceptance of rice imports.

“We would continue losing elections for the next five years,” then Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa told then U.S. President Bill Clinton, according to the document.

The Uruguay Round was a round of trade negotiations conducted by member states of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor to the World Trade Organization, beginning in 1986. In December 1991, the GATT general secretary presented to each member country a draft agreement with “tariffication without exception” as its main concept.

“To accept tariffication, we have to amend the Staple Food Control Law, but such an amendment will not be realized, as the Liberal Democratic Party is a minority ruling party in the House of Councillors,” Miyazawa told Clinton during a meeting in Washington on April 16, 1993, according to the document.

“Tariffication” means shifting to a system under which rice can be imported freely if tariffs are paid. At the time, Japan effectively banned rice imports under the Staple Food Control Law, which was repealed in 1995.

U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, who was present at the Miyazawa-Clinton meeting, called for tariffication without exceptions, saying that other countries would also demand exceptions if an exception were granted to one country.

At the time, there had been three Diet resolutions opposing rice imports.

Miyazawa’s LDP lost power in a House of Representatives election later that year. A multiparty coalition government headed by Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa was inaugurated in August 1993 and took over the negotiations. The Socialist Party, the coalition’s largest member, opposed tariffication. The LDP, which had become an opposition party, also continued to oppose it.

In December 1993, Germain Denis, chairman of the market-access negotiating group of the Uruguay Round, presented a compromise proposal that called for the implementation of minimum access, meaning that a specific import volume would be allowed, and would increase every year, in exchange for a six-year postponement of tariffication on rice as a special exception. Then Foreign Minister Tsutomu Hata met with Denis in Geneva on Dec. 12, and requested that non-trade factors be taken into consideration when discussing whether to extend the special exception after six years.

Hosokawa points to ‘free trade’

Non-trade factors” are such factors as food security and environmental protection concerning agricultural products, and Hata intended to leave open the option of avoiding tariffication after the expiration of the special measures. The GATT accepted the proposal, and Hosokawa announced his acceptance of the compromise on Dec. 14.

As a country that has benefited from free trade, I thought we had to conclude the negotiations. I worked on it, thinking I had to do so even if the administration fell,” Hosokawa told The Yomiuri Shimbun on the occasion of the release of the diplomatic documents.

I regret that we were unable to discuss the issue calmly, as slogans of ‘opposition to tariffication’ prevailed in Japan. With strong opposition from public opinion, it was the only way to bring the negotiations to a conclusion,” Kazuhito Yamashita, research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, told The Yomiuri Shimbun.

Yamashita was involved in the negotiations when he was working for the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry.

The government subsequently decided to impose tariffs on rice in April 1999 to curb the expansion of rice imports through the minimum access framework.