A new look at rice, from the Mekong to the Mississippi

Check my pantry every week and you’ll see rice paper for summer rolls, rice noodles for my limp version of pad Thai, a few packets of rice ramen, sake, rice wine vinegar, and rice cakes that the teen likes to smear with peanut butter. There’s a bag of arborio for the occasional spicy risotto, brown rice for khichdi on a rainy day, a basmati from Bryce Lundberg’s farm in Northern California, and a red rice that Anna McClung, a plant breeder, developed from a variety which are considered weeds.

In the freezer right now is a container of dosa batter made from rice flour and lentils from my local Indian grocer.

Call me a rice eater. Me and about half of humanity actually. Three billion people rely on rice as their staple grain. Hundreds of millions of farmers, most of them with small plots of land, depend on rice for their livelihoods.

I spent months working on an article on rice because, as the earth warms, rice is getting into trouble and threatening the livelihoods and livelihoods of many of the world’s poorest people. Tran Le Thuy helped with reporting from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Thanh Nguyen and Rory Doyle took photos and videos.

Extreme heat, erratic rainfall, rising sea levels: they all pose risks to rice growers, especially small farmers who have nothing to fall back on if their crops fail.

“Sometimes there isn’t enough rain when seedlings need water, or too much when the plants need to survive,” I wrote in the article. “As the sea enters, salt ruins the crop. As the nights get warmer, yields drop.”

Rice is also polluting. Flooded rice paddies release methane, a powerful planet-warming gas, estimated by estimate 8 percent of global methane emissions. But let’s keep that in perspective. Rice emissions account for a small fraction of coal, oil and gas emissions. We cannot eat coal and we cannot drink oil and gas. Rice is different. It’s jollof and pho, paella and pilaf. I once met a widow in eastern India who had nothing to eat but a bowl of rice and salt.

We cannot stop growing rice to slow down climate change. That’s impractical.

So what types of rice can be grown, and how?

Intensive rice production saved much of the world from starvation half a century ago. But it also reduced the great genetic diversity of traditional rice seeds around the world. Today, most farmers buy rice seeds, many of which are hybrid varieties that promise high yields and require chemical fertilizers, which in turn pollute streams and rivers. In many places, rice has drained underground aquifers.

Efforts are being made to protect and propagate traditional seed varieties that farmers can propagate on their farms rather than purchase from seed companies. Sometimes those traditional seeds are more resistant to climate stress. But their granules may not be white and fluffy like we’ve become accustomed to. Or they may not yield the big harvests that farmers want.

I try to buy old varieties of rice, and I try to buy from companies that buy from farmers who use a less water intensive method. It helps to diversify my family’s diet. It creates a market for farmers who are struggling. I am willing to pay more for that. A 14-ounce bag of Carolina gold just cost me $7.50 plus shipping. It’s something small and tangible that I can do as a consumer: promote more traditional varieties of rice and better ways to grow it.

In some places, farmers are moving away from rice.

In the Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s main rice bowl, the government is encouraging farmers to use part of their land to raise shrimp. This is a risky approach.

I saw that in Bangladesh, where intensive shrimp farming has been displacing the rice paddies along the coast for decades. Shrimp need salt water. And as shrimp farmers allowed the seawater to seep in, the rivers, ponds, and eventually the soil became salty. Now there is an acute shortage of drinking water in the dry season. Several farmers I’ve met are struggling to return their land to rice.

And other grains? Sorghum and millet are often more nutritious than rice. But rice has a prepared market. Governments often buy rice at fixed prices. They subsidize the fertilizers needed to grow that rice. There are not always the same incentives for sorghum and millet. Encouraging farmers to switch means offering incentives, training and also a market.

I was struck by the optimism of Dang Kieu Nhan, the son of rice farmers who now heads the Mekong Development Research Center at Can Tho University. Vietnam’s farmers have overcome adversity before and will do so again. “Local people will come up with more solutions,” he told me when we spoke via video conference. “I feel full of confidence.”

I hope you read the article, maybe with a bowl of congee or arroz con leche. Maybe a cup of sake. Or a cool horchata.

Where does the Colorado’s water go? The Colorado River is in crisis. It’s less about long showers and more about what we’re going to eat.

Buying time in the West: Arizona, California and Nevada have agreed to take less water from the Colorado. In return, the US government will funnel $1.2 billion to those states.

Clashing summit aims to: The US sought to maintain President Biden’s climate goals while helping allies in the Group of 7 who want to increase their access to fossil fuels.

Before you leave: lessons from a saber-toothed survivor

About 252 million years ago, erupting supervolcanoes plunged Earth into a series of extinctions. It was a terrible time to be alive, and scientists have long believed that large predators lacked food to survive. But at least one saber-toothed beast did, according to new research that could provide useful lessons as humans face their own ecological crises.

Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill, Chris Plourde and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward