It rained last week. Quite hard. For half an hour. This pretty much counts as a news story what with rain being such a scarce commodity this summer. Lord Muck returned from a trip to Ireland at the start of the month, still a green and pleasant land though just as sunny as England, to find a massive contrast. The driest July since records began in 1836 and the hottest summer on record, officially announced yesterday. Officially the whole of England and Wales (!) is now in drought. So thirty minutes of rain is news of a sort, though in that quantity it doesn’t make the slightest difference to the parched landscape, or the rivers, parks or gardens that we all appreciate – especially when they either disappear or completely change their appearance.
The Government’s COBRA committee has today, finally sat up and taken notice. In a cost of living crisis the price of food is about to go through the roof as crops fail both in the UK and across the continent, which is where we import most of our fresh fruit and veg from most of the year. As the Starmer Government was in its final days and the King of the North was preparing to ride into town (on a train, not a horse) to assume the crown, his team reached out to Muck in mid May seeking views on five Climate and Nature policies that were high priorities for early implementation. One of them was: ”Focus on food security to tackle the cost of living crisis. We need to grow far more of our own food, especially horticultural produce as climate breakdown and the increasing difficulties of international supply chains make our strategy of ‘cheap’ imports unsustainable, and risk sudden and substantial price rises for foods people rely on (its already happening). The horticulture sector needs significant investment and guaranteed prices to make that investment viable”.
In the intervening three months since I wrote that, it has proved it to be both appropriate advice, and startlingly risky too. Growing our own food in the current conditions as farmers all over the country will attest, has become extraordinarily difficult. But importing it from wildfire-ravaged Spain or other parts of southern Europe which are far better prepared for these climatic conditions? Well, that looks like a challenge too. And a very expensive one for consumers across the continent and beyond. The cost of living crisis and the water shortages/drought and excess heat of the past few months (and for how much longer?) are inextricably bound up, whether that be people struggling to survive in over heated flats without access to shade or parks, or the prices we will all have to pay for basic foodstuffs. Who knew that the climate crisis had massive today, right now, impacts on ordinary people’s lives. But who took any notice when 30 years ago scientists warned that by the mid-2020s this would be the likely scenario if nothing was done. Well we are in the mid 2020s now, and that mere 30 minutes of rain is really is the news story.