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

A mondina – a seasonal female worker in the paddy fields – weeding the rice crop Photograph: Marco Massa and Haakon Sand/for The Guardian

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.