Italy’s Rice Belt Faces Its Toughest Drought Season Since 2022

In Breme, a small town on the Lombardy side of the Po River, Giuseppe Tagliabue made a choice this summer that his family has never had to make in three generations of growing rice. With water running short, he decided to save part of his fields and let the rest go.

"Because of this terrible water shortage, we had to make some rather drastic choices," Tagliabue said, describing how he redirected all the water he could secure to a portion of his estate, Cascina Rinalda, abandoning plots that never reached maturity. His farm is one of roughly 3,500 across Italy's rice belt, concentrated in the Po Valley, now confronting a drought that local growers say is harder to manage than the severe shortage that hit the region in 2022.

Italy grows more rice than any other country in Europe, with roughly 235,000 hectares planted in 2025, according to the national rice authority, Ente Nazionale Risi. More than 80% of that crop comes from the northern provinces of Pavia, Vercelli and Novara, land that has depended for generations on water flowing down from the Alps through the Po basin. That dependence is now the region's biggest liability. The Po River Basin Authority has declared a high level of drought severity, warning that reserves in the Alpine lakes that feed the river are running low. Lake Maggiore, one of the main sources for the rice fields, is now classified as being in extreme drought. Water levels on the Po itself recently hit a record low for this point in the season at Cremona.

Rice needs standing water through much of the growing season, and this year that water simply hasn't been there in the volumes farmers need. The response has been an irrigation system built for scarcity rather than abundance.

At the Est Sesia irrigation consortium, which supplies much of the growing area spanning Lombardy and Piedmont, water manager Franco Bullano said the shortage forced an approach the region hasn't needed before. "This year, we had to introduce a rotation system," he said, describing a scheme where different sections of farmland receive water in alternating weeks so scarce supplies stretch across the whole district. The rotation has kept most of the region from the worst outcomes so far, Bullano said, but the underlying math is not encouraging. "We only retain 10 to 11% of rainfall," he said, a figure that points to how much of the basin's water simply isn't captured for use before it's needed most.

Some in the sector are pushing further, toward changing how the fields themselves work. Alberto Lasagna, director of the Pavia branch of the farmers' association Confagricoltura, has floated a "water farming" model that would use the soil itself as a natural reservoir, storing moisture underground during wetter periods for release when the summer runs dry. It's a longer-term fix, and one that would require rethinking practices that have gone largely unchanged for decades in a region long accustomed to reliable water.

The financial toll is already being counted. Confagricoltura's Pavia branch estimates the local rice sector could lose more than €100 million, or roughly $116 million, this season, a figure the group attributes not just to drought but to rising production costs and falling paddy rice prices as cheaper imports from outside the European Union compete for market share. That combination matters for how the story gets read. The drought is real and well documented by the Po Basin Authority's own monitoring data, but it's landing on a sector that was already under separate financial pressure from global trade competition, and untangling how much of any single farmer's loss traces to weather versus prices isn't something the current data settles cleanly.

For American readers, the connection runs through the pantry rather than the wallet directly, at least for now. Arborio and Carnaroli, the short-grain varieties used in risotto, are largely grown in this same stretch of northern Italy, and trade-data provider Volza ranks the United States as the world's largest importer of Arborio rice, with most shipments sourced from Italy, Pakistan and Spain. A smaller harvest in the Po Valley doesn't automatically mean higher prices on U.S. grocery shelves. Some Arborio rice is grown domestically in states like California, giving retailers and importers an alternative supply to lean on, and the scale of any pass-through to U.S. shelf prices isn't yet quantified in the data available. What is measurable is the supply-side risk: less water available at the source narrows the cushion in a specialty rice market that was already tightening because of import competition and yield pressure in recent seasons.

Whether this season ends up rivaling 2022, when a comparable drought devastated Italian rice output, will depend heavily on how much rain and snowmelt the Alps deliver before the harvest, expected to run through September and into October in much of the Po Valley. The Po Basin Authority continues to update its drought severity classifications through the season, and Ente Nazionale Risi typically publishes harvest volume estimates once the crop is in. Those releases, along with any updated damage estimates from Confagricoltura, will be the next concrete data points showing whether this year's rationing measures were enough to hold the line.

For now, the story is one of a region improvising against a resource it long took for granted. Tagliabue said giving up on rice altogether isn't a realistic option for a farm built entirely around it. "Our farms are entirely geared towards rice, from the dryers to the machinery," he said. "Changing crops means changing many other things as well. It's not that easy." That's the trade-off Italy's rice belt is now working through in real time, field by field, week by week, as it waits to see how much of this year's crop survives to harvest.