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Abstract
U.S. rice policy is evaluated in this paper with a global modeling framework to examine the
potential impacts of domestic policy reforms using stochastic analysis. Results of this study
show that without government payments, the international rice price and U.S. farm price and
their volatility will increase. For the U.S., rice area harvested, production, net exports, and
the country’s share in global net exports will decrease under a no-government-payment
scenario. Analysis of trade of major exporting and importing countries indicates that
volatility of international trade also increases under the same scenario. While unilateral
elimination of government support for U.S. rice results in a decline in world net rice trade as
a result of decreased purchases by major rice importers, the major rice net exporter
competitors increase their share at the expense of the U.S. The stochastic analysis provides
market insights as it shows how outcomes are empirically-distributed as opposed to the
incomplete picture provided by point estimates generated by deterministic analysis.