Hare-grained

IN MANY Asian countries, painstakingly inscribing individual grains of rice with minuscule letters is a traditional craft. Just imagine, therefore, what bureaucrats in such places can get up to when they have a whole crop to work with. Tariffs, quotas, floor prices, ceiling prices, producer subsidies, consumer subsidies, state monopolies—no measure is too meddlesome (see ). As a result, the market for rice is more distorted than that for any other staple. Rice growers pocketed at least $60 billion in subsidies last year, according to the OECD, twice as much as maize (corn) farmers, the second-most-coddled lot.