Almost All Rice Never Goes Anywhere
Rice feeds more people than any other crop. About a tenth of it ever crosses a border.
The FAO's October 2026 brief forecasts world production of around 552.5 million tonnes milled for 2026/27, utilisation of 559.1 million, and international trade of around 61.2 million tonnes. Divide trade by production and you get roughly 11%. That arithmetic is ours, not a figure the FAO publishes, so treat it as "roughly a tenth" rather than a statistic.
That thinness explains everything odd about rice prices. The USDA notes eight exporters account for about 90% of global trade, and sub-Saharan Africa takes roughly 30% of imports. The United States is under 2% of world production but around 5% of exports.
So the world rice market is a narrow channel carved off the side of an enormous, mostly domestic crop. Narrow channels are easy to block. When India restricted exports across 2022–23, world prices spiked. When it removed minimum export prices in October 2024, they came back down. One country's trade policy moves the global price because the global market is a sliver of the global harvest.
On the headline human number: IRRI's own figure is that more than 3.5 billion people depend on rice for more than 20% of their daily calories. We attribute that to IRRI specifically, because we could not find a primary FAO document stating it, and the looser "rice feeds half the world" line is a different and vaguer claim that gets used interchangeably with it.
Every figure above comes from a rolling forecast. Date-stamp them rather than trusting them, which is good practice for most things that sound like facts about agriculture.