Importing tomatoes – literally paying for water – from drought-hit Spain is absurd, says Dorset NFU’s Tim Gelfs: ‘food shortages are just beginning’
Water, water everywhere, the saying goes? Well, while writing this we actually have had some welcome rain that will hopefully motivate the green stuff to reappear. Not nearly enough, of course, but a welcome start: fingers’ crossed we will get some more (although, thinking about it, the kids have broken up for the summer holidays now, so of course it will rain!)
The hysterical media coverage of ‘drought-stricken Britain’ and ‘empty reservoirs’ has meant the roses and the paddling pools are all going to suffer with hosepipe bans across the country. It reminds me of the old Morecombe and Wise piano sketch: “We’re getting all the right rain, just not in the right places and never at the right time!”
I see our environment secretary has announced the cleaning up of our defunct water companies, and he did mention something about reservoirs and storage … we’ll see. I can’t believe we keep being told we are one of the richest countries in the world when our utility infrastructure is an embarrassment, with hardly any long term investment or thinking. But as with all crises, the taps will have to actually dry up before the government’s fire engine comes to the rescue – costing two or three times as much as it should, naturally.
Here in the south west, we can all see for ourselves how a drought affects us. arable crop yields are down, and livestock farmers are already eating into their winter feedstocks. It is costly and doesn’t do the balance sheet much good, but so far we can manage it.
The real challenge is for farmers growing root crops, soft fruit and salads – who rely on irrigation to get the right amount of water at the right time to produce a crop worth harvesting. Yet investment in water storage, and in the networks to move water where it’s needed, has been neglected for too long by both governments and the big retailers failing to support vital industry investment. No, they had a better plan: let’s import most of it! And not from countries blessed with an abundance of water, but from Mediterranean countries such as Spain. Have you looked at a weather map recently? You think we’ve got problems with water! Just take the humble tomato: we import approximately 400,000 tons every year – well over 80 per cent of our UK market. And guess what? Around 95 per cent of it is water. You really couldn’t make it up. This has to be one of the most expensive ways of importing water into our country.
And where is our illustrious climate secretary when you need him? Of course, he’s championing solar farms on all the land where we could grow our food … so we can import more water disguised as fruit or salads.
Brilliant.
We are just beginning to see the stresses of water shortages and weather patterns in our shops. I bet all of us in the last few months have been into a supermarket for some veg or salad and found they have been short of something? This isn’t a mistake, or a problem with the ordering, it’s just not available!
Right now we are in the infancy of food shortages, but if we are not going to invest in home-grown food security and instead rely more and more on imports from drought-stricken regions around the world, we had better get used to it!
