Understanding World Rice Trade Dynamics with Peter Bachmann
I sat down with Peter Bachmann, and we dove into the world of rice. If you’ve looked at a rice budget lately and wondered how in the world this still works… you’re not alone.
We spend a lot of time in agriculture asking what we could be doing better. How to be more efficient. How to cut costs. How to squeeze one more bushel out of the same ground. That’s just how we’re wired. But this conversation forced me to sit with a harder question, what if the problem isn’t how we’re farming?
What if it’s who we’re being asked to compete against?
Peter said something that stuck with me. He said at some point you have to ask, “Is it us, or is it them?” And here’s the truth… it’s them.
In countries like India, the government is covering around 86% of the value of that rice crop. That means if that crop is worth $100, that farmer is only exposed to $14 of risk. The rest is carried by policy. Carried by the government. Carried in a way that allows them to keep producing, keep expanding, and keep selling—no matter what the market is doing.
Meanwhile, here at home, we’re paying for every input out of pocket and hoping the market meets us somewhere close to breakeven. That’s not a complaint, it’s just reality. But it’s not the same reality they’re operating in.
And it doesn’t stop at subsidies. Their government is buying rice, storing it, and then releasing it back into the global market at prices we simply can’t match. So when we lose markets like Nigeria, or start feeling pressure in places like Mexico, it’s not because we forgot how to grow rice. It’s because we’re competing against a system designed to win on price, not necessarily on efficiency or quality.
Peter called it the “Race to the Bottom” in terms of price. US rice farmers stove to win but that is a race we do not want to be a competitor. We cannot withstand the price to continue to fall.
At the same time, we’re seeing pressure here at home, too. Rice imports into the U.S. have grown more than 250% over the last couple of decades. That’s not a small shift. That’s a fundamental change in where our food is coming from. And while some of that came from us not growing what consumers wanted in the past, that’s not the case anymore. We’re adapting. We’re growing different varieties. We’re trying to meet demand.
The question now is whether we’ll fight to hold onto that space.
We talked through all the policy pieces… The WTO, trade cases, tariffs. And I’ll be honest, it’s not simple. The system that’s supposed to keep trade fair moves slow. Painfully slow. Slow enough that an entire market can disappear before anything gets resolved. So in the meantime, tools like tariffs are what get used to try and level things out, even if they’re not perfect.
But somewhere in the middle of all that policy talk, there was a moment that felt a little more human.
India isn’t just doing this to win a trade battle. They’re doing it to keep people on the land. To support rural communities. To prevent millions of people from leaving farms and flooding into cities that can’t support them.
And sitting there listening to that, I couldn’t help but think, we’re trying to do the exact same thing.
We just don’t always say it that way.
Out here, it looks like fewer acres. It looks like tighter margins. It looks like families sitting at the table, trying to decide what next year holds. I hear the comments. And I ask myself and my family, “Is farming really worth it?”
But this isn’t about something being broken on the farm. It isn’t about farmers making bad decisions or poor management choices. It’s about a system that hasn’t kept up with the reality we’re farming in.
There’s no clean ending to this story. Not yet. But there is movement. There are conversations happening. There’s pressure building in ways we haven’t seen in a while. And maybe that’s where it starts.
Because if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that people will care about agriculture when they understand it.
So we keep telling the story. We keep having the hard conversations. We keep showing what this really looks like, beyond the bushel and beyond the headlines.
Catch the full episode on the podcast:
🍎 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/field-good-life/id1795513436
💚 https://open.spotify.com/show/2xQkadHp60CkKLaD43Eotq