Haiti buys roughly four-fifths of the rice it consumes from abroad and pays a premium for it. Import rules cap broken kernels at four percent, which pushes the country toward some of the costliest non-fragrant long grain rice anywhere — a strange position for a poor nation that depends on rice as a staple.

Richardson and colleagues test whether that standard matches what buyers actually want. A non-hypothetical field experiment in open-air markets, with three hundred observations, measured how shoppers priced rice containing more broken grains. Across locations and income groups, only the highest earners paid extra for a cleaner sample.

The authors read this as a signal to policymakers that consumers will accept rice above the four percent threshold. Since broken rice carries the same nutritional value and can be sourced more cheaply on world markets, they argue that relaxing the rule could ease food insecurity by offering an alternative to expensive domestic and imported grain.