Dhe shopping at the greengrocer’s is becoming a luxury for many Spaniards. This summer, the high prices for melons, which families like to take to the beach, are particularly painful. Your price has tripled. A watermelon weighing six kilograms can cost ten euros and more. They are almost 90 percent more expensive than last summer. This is mainly due to the scarce supply. After demand fell, farmers planted less that year. Then nature made itself felt: torrential rains in several growing areas first washed away the seeds, then the heat set in unusually early.
The second heat wave this year
These freak weather conditions in particular have been causing problems for the producers for months, and their consequences can be felt in the shops, even if the temperatures dropped on Tuesday: one of the most extreme and intense heat waves is coming to an end on the Iberian Peninsula. It was the second wave this year and it probably won’t be the last. A new temperature record of 41 degrees was set in May, which was followed in mid-June by one of the earliest heat waves since weather records began.
But drought is just one of the big problems this year. In Aragón and Catalonia, apricots, peaches and nectarines were hit hard by frost and hail at the end of spring – before it soon became very warm. It is feared that up to 70 percent of the entire harvest will be lost. “The increase in the price of stone fruit is due to the sharp drop in supply due to the bad weather,” says the producer association Fepex.
Desertification progresses
Around 20 percent less stone fruit was also harvested in the Murcia region. The “Garden of Europe” on the Mediterranean is actually one of the hottest areas in the country. But this spring, in just over two months, it rained four times as much as in average years: fields were flooded, fruit and vegetables began to rot. A large part of the lettuce and melons sown in February was lost.
However, the unusually heavy rainfall was an exception and was limited to Murcia, Valencia and the province of Almería. Drought prevails in most of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands. The winter was initially too dry and very mild for months. Rain only set in in the spring, which was no longer able to compensate for the precipitation deficit that had been building up for several years. The reservoirs are currently only 40 percent full, and desertification is progressing.
“Climate change kills”
The devastating forest fires of the past few days show how dried out the soil and vegetation are. Since the beginning of the year, more than 300 fires have destroyed around 140,000 hectares. That is almost seven times more than in an average year. It has been a good 16,000 hectares since last weekend. There is talk of the worst summer fire in 15 years with devastating consequences for Spanish forest farmers.
“Climate change kills. It kills people, destroys our ecosystem and destroys our society’s most valuable property,” said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez during a visit to Extremadura, where three major fires raged. And it will get even drier: the government warns that precipitation could fall by around a fifth by 2030.
Illegal Wells and “Water Wars” Warnings
Farmers try to combat this shortage by digging wells illegally. According to estimates, there could be up to half a million such wells. They contribute to the fact that the groundwater level drops even further. For example on the edge of the Doñana National Park on the Andalusian Atlantic coast, where the globally unique wetland is slowly drying up. With the cultivation and export of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and currants, most of which go to Germany, up to 600 million euros can be earned every year – provided there is enough water.
In Spain, some are already warning of “water wars” because thirsty agriculture simply cannot get enough. Pipelines and canals, some of which were still being built during the Franco dictatorship, supply the arid south with water from the interior of the country, but water is also becoming scarcer there. The Spanish government is therefore spending more than 2 billion euros over the next few years to modernize irrigation systems and prevent water from being lost along the way.
Extreme temperatures will increase sharply
But that will not be enough. According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), aridity, longer periods of drought and extreme temperatures will increase sharply in the Mediterranean region in the coming decades. In Spain, they have risen by about 1.7 degrees since the end of the 19th century, of which about 1.2 degrees in the past 60 years. Spanish winegrowers are already complaining about the consequences of climate change and are beginning to retreat from the Mediterranean and inland to the cooler north or to higher altitudes. In the Cava region near Barcelona, the harvest starts three weeks earlier on average.
Wine consumption can be reduced, grain remains essential for survival. But it is also affected. Spanish Agriculture Minister Luis Planas has just had to lower the forecast for the harvest from the original 20 million tons: “Due to the drought, we will be in the range of 17 to 18 million tons.”
