In Spain and southern France locally grown rice is more than a key ingredient of regional specialities such as paella, it is also crucial for biodiversity, as Malcolm Smith reports

In Tarragona, a stylish town established by the Romans on a hilltop overlooking Spain’s east coast, it is difficult to find a restaurant that does not have paella on its menu. Sometimes described as Spain’s signature dish, its variable blend of vegetables, some chicken or rabbit, and – hereabouts especially – prawns, langoustines and, maybe, some cuttlefish, invariably attracts the diner’s full attention.

But a paella is not a paella without its main and characteristic ingredient: rice – round-grained, pearled in the centre and unbroken. The most appropriate variety – called bomba – absorbs all the flavours and aromas of the more showy ingredients as the dish is cooked.

Most non-Spanish paella eaters will assume, wrongly, that the rice comes from southeast Asia where the lion’s share of this staple food is grown. In fact, the rice you will eat in Tarragona is as local as the langoustines.

Around 100,000 tonnes of rice are produced annually from 21,000 hectares of rice paddies in the delta of the Ebro where this great Spanish river flows east into the Mediterranean just southwest of Tarragona. They occupy two thirds of the land, interspersed with wildlife-rich marshes and pools.

Altogether, Europe produces about 2.7 million tonnes of rice annually from about 430,000 hectares of paddyfields, most of it in Italy’s Po valley, around Valencia and the Guadalquivir estuary in Spain, in parts of Greece and Portugal, and in the Camargue – the delta of the Rhône – on the south coast of France.

That is not much out of the world’s annual production of 550 million tonnes, but Europe’s rice paddies are increasingly valued as much for their wildlife as they are for their edible crop.

In 2000, when the EU was considering reducing the support it provides for southern Europe’s rice growers, it was – surprisingly – the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) that leapt to their defence. It argued that the support was invaluable.

Without subsidies, Europe’s rice farmers cannot compete with southeast Asian producers and their economies of scale and cheap labour costs. In 2003, when the new EU ‘rice regime’ was announced, supports were reduced but not removed.

‘Rice is still the best conservation option in those areas where natural wetlands have long been drained and converted to farmland,’ said an RSPB spokesperson at the time. ‘The paddyfields are a major source of food for many bird species including waders, herons, egrets and ducks, some of them of concern because they are declining.’

In the past three years, rice growing in several parts of Europe has become more environmentally friendly and even better for wildlife.

To experience how pro-wildlife it can be, there is no better place than the paddyfields in the Ebro delta near the little village of Els Muntells. Here, RietVell SA, a company set up by Spanish ornithological charity Sociedad Española de Ornitologia, manages up to 70 hectares of paddies organically.

RietVell uses chicken manure not chemical fertilisers. It shuns insecticides and it reduces the weeds that compete with rice by controlling water levels to drown them and by hand weeding rather than spraying weedkillers.

‘We get large numbers of little egrets and grey herons feeding in the paddies,’ says Ignasi Ripoll, RietVell’s manager. ‘A lot of black-winged stilts (long-legged, black and white waders), squacco herons and purple swamphens (chicken-sized, iridescent blue waterbirds like giant moorhens) and sometimes flamingos feed here. They eat the crayfish, frogs and small fish found in the warm water.’

Rice fields provide a palette of colour through the year. In winter their bare soil is muddy brown or silver if they are covered in water; in spring and early summer the young crop is vibrant grass-green while, by early autumn, it has matured to a golden colour.

The fields impose an artificial rectangular pattern across the delta, each separated by a low earth bank of dried mud, grasses and reeds sprouting an occasional willow or tamarisk.

Water channels supply the freshwater the rice requires.
They extract it from the Ebro way upstream and carry it into the paddies via a system of sluices so that their water depth can be controlled.

A similar system operates in the Camargue, the equally vast area of silty-soiled flatlands, parts of it still natural marsh, reedbeds and lakes, in the delta of the Rhône where nearly 20,000 hectares of rice is cultivated.

At Domaine de Paulon, near the tiny hamlet of Le Sambuc, M and Mme Blanc, two of around 100 rice farmers in the Camargue, grow 40 hectares of rice alongside 25 hectares of wheat and 35 hectares of lucerne, a grass-like forage crop for the bulls they keep.

Along with its famed white horses, bull rearing – and the Provence variety of bullfighting – has long been an integral part of Camarguese culture.

‘We grow some of our rice organically without pesticides and artificial fertilisers,’ says Mme Blanc. ‘Last year we got €345 [$459] a tonne. For our non-organic rice we got €145 [$193] a tonne, but growing it organically is much more difficult because we have to rotate the crop with wheat and lucerne to stop pests building up. We only produce organic rice one year in three on the same field.’

But Mme Blanc, sitting outside the couple’s cream roughcast farmhouse with its powder blue shutters on a warm spring day – their three dogs languid in the sun – is not optimistic for the future of rice growing here.

‘We try not to use too much insecticide,’ she says. ‘It’s expensive and it’s not good for the environment. But most farmers here use a lot of the stuff. We grow pest-resistant rice varieties and use water levels to kill off weeds as much as possible. But it’s difficult to make any profit even with the EU subsidies. If these are reduced any more, we’ll have to look at growing other crops, maybe lentils or peas, or whatever else the market wants.

‘Without the freshwater going into the paddies, the soil would stay salty (nowhere in these deltas is more than a metre or so above sea level). Within a few years we might not be able to grow crops at all. The Camargue cannot live without rice,’ she adds, emotionally.

It is a sentiment with which most wildlife experts agree. Deltas such as the Camargue and the Ebro have long been drastically modified. Their giant rivers have been embanked to stop them flooding as they would have done naturally. And most of their marshes, reedbeds and shallow pools have been drained so that their rich soils could be ploughed and farmed.

Rice paddies can really be regarded as the best of a bad job. They are not as rich a resource for wildlife as the natural marshes that they have largely replaced, but – because they are filled with shallow water for much of the year – they become wonderful breeding places for a plethora of invertebrates and amphibians, such as frogs. As a consequence, they attract a wealth of both breeding and migrating birds such as exotic-looking avocets and glossy ibises.

he paddies are seeded in late spring, and then flooded with water,’ says Nicolas Sadoul, an ornithologist with considerable professional experience in the Camargue. ‘That attracts Mediterranean and black-headed gulls because the water brings worms to the surface. We get migrating wading birds such as redshank and black-tailed godwit in the paddies then, too.

‘As the rice grows, but before it’s too tall [the crop reaches a metre high], grey herons, squacco herons and little egrets feed in them. The herons and egrets breed communally in groups of trees scattered about the delta, but they rely in large part on the paddies for feeding. ‘In winter a lot of farmers keep their paddies flooded to attract ducks and other birds because hunting is so central to the Camarguese culture,’ he adds.

In the Ebro delta, almost all of the rice farmers have entered an agri-environment scheme devised by the Catalan government. It provides them with payments in addition to their EU subsidies for farming more sensitively.

‘It’s a good scheme,’ says RietVell’s Ripoll. ‘The farmers cannot use insecticides against the most common pest, the rice stem borer, a moth larva that bores into the stems and destroys the rice heads. Instead, they put out small containers of pherom-ones (a man-made sex hormone specific to this moth) among the crop and these attract it away from the rice.

‘They have to keep the paddies flooded in winter for birds to feed and they can’t burn the rice stubble after harvesting the crop. They have to plough it back into the soil.

‘Now dragonflies, and other insects, are abundant again here. There are clouds of them in summer. And counts we have done show that our organic paddyfields are even more wildlife-rich. They attract twice the number of feeding birds that the conventional paddies have,’ he adds.

The same benefits of organic rice growing have been established in trials in the Camargue by Dr François Mesléard and her team at the Tour du Valat Research Centre. Ironically, Dr Mesléard’s team found no difference in the abundance of pest insects between organic rice crops and those sprayed with insecticide. The reason? The insecticide was killing the very carnivorous invertebrates like spiders that naturally prey on the pests. These carnivores were six times more abundant on organic rice compared with sprayed crops.

Little wonder then that the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is dubious about the benefits of using insecticides. ‘One spider can kill five planthoppers [another common rice pest] in two or three minutes,’ says the IRRI’s website. The site also quotes studies showing little difference in rice yields between the two systems.

The impact of some of these chemicals on amphibians can be devastating. Dr Mesléard’s team found that a commonly used insecticide killed more than a third of stripeless tree frogs living in the paddies. Combined use of the insecticide and a weedkiller killed up to 92 per cent of them.

In what used to be the floodplain of the Guadalquivir River in southwestern Spain where 36,000 hectares of rice is grown, a kind of ‘middle way’ prevails, where chemicals are only used when it is essential.

‘Our regional government employs technicians to monitor invertebrate pest levels,’ says Dr Jordi Figuerola of the Estación Biológica Doñana Research Centre. ‘Only when they decide that they are high enough are our rice farmers allowed to spray. They also limit the use of weedkillers and fertiliser to make farmers use traditional methods like flooding out weeds by controlling water levels. And they use pheromones to distract the rice borer.’

If subsidies for Europe’s rice farmers are to continue long term, it seems their justification will increasingly depend on the quality of wildlife habitat they provide. The crop will be an incidental benefit. And the more that governments in the rice-growing areas follow the Ebro delta’s example or encourage farmers to grow rice organically, the more justifiable the subsidies will be.