Climate Change Challenges In Italy's Food Basket

Organikos

March 1

The inside of a rice plant about to flower. With global heating, farmers fear extreme weather events such as drought will become more frequent

Thanks to Ottavia Spaggiari for this article, and to Marco Massa and Haakon Sand for the photos. We are closer to the challenges coffee faces in the context of climate change, but we know it is a global race to find solutions:

Risotto crisis: the fight to save Italy's beloved dish from extinction

After drought devastated prized arborio and carnaroli harvests in the Po valley, new rice varieties offer a glimmer of hope. But none are yet suitable for use in the traditional recipe

Biometeorologist Marta Galvagno at work

For most of winter and spring in 2022, Luigi Ferraris, a 58-year-old rice farmer from Mortara, a town in the Po valley, remained hopeful. Rainfall had been down 40% in the first six months of the year, and snow had accumulated thinly in the Alps, prompting an 88% drop in the amount of water coming to the Po River from snow-melt; flow in the river and its connected canals was at a historic low.

But Ferraris believed things would soon return to normal. "I thought the lack of water would be temporary," he says.

Historically, access to water had never been an obstacle in this lowland. It lies at the heart of the Po valley, or Pianura Padana, a floodplain in northern Italy where large swaths of land were originally swamps and a hotbed of malaria. For centuries, local farmers fought to push back the water, constructing drainage and levelling land to slowly transform the wetlands into crop fields and paddies.

"In this area, the problem has always been to keep the water away," says Alberto Lasagna, director of Confagricoltura Pavia, a local branch of the General Confederation of Italian Agriculture. "It has never been the other way around."

Ferraris realised the full extent of what he was about to lose only at the end of May 2022, when his rice fields had not turned their usual luxuriant green. "They were all brown," he says. "It all looked like dry straw."

In his 37 years running the rice farm that he inherited from his grandfather, Ferraris had never seen anything like it. He lost more than half of his harvest and he wasn't alone.

Italy is Europe's largest rice producer, growing about 50% of the rice produced in the EU. Most of its rice fields are in the Po valley, which stretches across much of the north of the country. It is in these fields that the unique risotto rice varieties, such as carnaroli and arborio, are grown...