Climate change now threatens one of the basic and most used products in the Mediterranean diet: the tomato. In fact, in In the UK it is almost impossible to find tomatoes in supermarkets due to a serious supply problem. The problem is such that the supermarket that gets tomatoes has to rationalize it.
The extreme climatic conditions that we are experiencing in Spain or in the north of Morocco, the main tomato producers, with a lot of cold, a lot of rain, a lot of heat… are greatly affecting the crops. All this added to the high production costs that farmers have been suffering for months, which has made production drop up to 22% compared to the same period of the previous year.
And what is happening in the United Kingdom, according to some British media, are the effects of Brexit, the increase in bureaucracy for truckers from the European Union to enter the country.
A farmer’s concern
A team from ‘Four a day’ has interviewed live Remigio Ávila, a horticultural farmer, who wanted to warn about the problem that we can have in the near future in our country with the production of tomatoes:
“At the moment there is, but I think that at the rate that we are soon, sooner rather than later, it will happen to us like the United Kingdom. We cannot continue producing at the rate we are producing and even below production costs”.
“The problem is that we have been increased costs around 40-50% in the last year and the chains do not want to assume these expenses and we are reaching the point of the more we produce, the more we lose… we cannot continue like this, we have reached a situation that we have had to shift to other crops and stop planting tomares” , assures a visibly concerned farmer live on ‘CAD’.
