AS SOUTHERN EUROPE continues to grapple with an ongoing heatwave, some may worry if it will affect the produce available on Irish supermarket shelves in the coming weeks.
The UN’s World Meteorological Agency has warned that the trend shows “no signs of decreasing” and many of the knock-on effects of baking temperatures in the rest of Europe are with us already.
The record-breaking and ongoing Cerberus Heatwave, named after a three-headed, monstrous dog in Greek mythology, is bringing blistering temperatures to countries including Italy, Spain, France and Greece.
In Greece, sites like the Acropolis have had to close during the hottest hours of the day this week as temperatures soared to 43C.
Firefighters from across Europe were also scrambled to Greece to battle a raging wildfire close to Athens.
In Italy, there were highs this week of 46C in Sicily and Sardinia while Rome boiled in 43C.
Parts of Spain also reached 45C.
“The big one at the moment is melons,” says Justin Leonard, the managing director of Jackie Leonard & Sons fruit and vegetable business in Dublin.
“Yellow melons, Galia melons, cantaloupe melons, watermelons, all melons really are in very short supply because of the heat in Spain.
“That’s an immediate one that’s happening and having an impact now,” Leonard tells The Journal.
It is an issue Leonard has been grappling with for the past 18 months.
“Last year we had a heatwave in Central Europe as well, which wasn’t publicised as much as this year, but it was an extremely dry summer across mainland Europe and then a particularly dry winter,” said Leonard.
“As a result, the reservoirs didn’t fill in early spring because they didn’t get the downpours they would normally get.
“So the reservoirs never refilled and now because of the current heatwave, the reservoirs are being put under even more pressure and that’s going to have a huge impact because growers now are being curtailed in how much water they can use to irrigate the land and the crops.”
This was a particular issue in Spain, which suffered the biggest losses from wildfires of any European Union country last year amid a record-hot 2022.
Four people, including one firefighter, died in blazes that consumed 306,000 hectares.
However, Leonard is reluctant to say the situation “worries” him, instead opting for the word “concerned”.
He suggests that the full extent of current heatwave across southern Europe won’t be known for around three to four weeks, though believes there may be shortages in the autumn.
Although no two years in the fresh produce business are ever the same, Leonard notes that there has been 18 consecutive months of “poor harvests of crops, but in the winter and summer cycle, and it’s looking like we are going to have it for another 12 months for sure”.
“I know it’s raining in Ireland and a lot of the UK has rain,” said Leonard, “but if you look at the rest of Europe, 40 degrees plus in Rome, 40C in Athens, around 36C in Spain where the melons and courgettes would come from.
“This is intense heat, seriously high air temperatures, but in turn, we’ve got seriously high soil temperatures and that’s where the problem lies.
“When the soil becomes too hot, the plant isn’t going to grow, it’s actually going to die.
“It’s only on the news in the past week or 10 days, but Spain has had these high soil temperatures for the last four or five weeks, if not longer.”
Leonard explains that part of the problem for harvesting in countries like Spain is the knock-on impact the heats have on water usage.
Because water is primarily used for drinking and then feeding livestock, watering plants and crops will be much further down the scale.
“Growing techniques now use considerably huge amounts of water and it’s just physically not there.
He also warns that Spain is experiencing weather extremes year-round, which are impacting crops.
“The public wants to know why we don’t have lettuce and tomatoes in February on our shelves. “And we’re saying, ‘well, it comes from Spain.’
“Then they’re saying, ‘yeah, sure that’s lovely, sunny weather,’ but no, we’ve had snow in certain parts of Spain in January and February, which was unheard of.
“Only four weeks ago in northern Spain, they had hail showers which destroyed an awful lot of the apricot production and peach production.”
Leonard warns that this will inevitably “push the price up”.
“We’re in an open market, it’s supply and demand, and if you haven’t got a supply and you have a big demand, obviously prices go up.
“And they’re not coming down because growers can’t afford to produce the volumes required to make produce cheaper because we’re not getting the yields out of the product that’s planted as a result of the weather.”
It’s currently the growing season in Spain for onions and potatoes and Leonard said the impact on Irish shopping shelves will become clearer when they are harvested.
But he explains to The Journal that consumers will already be seeing its effects.
“The new season of Spanish onions came in in the last four weeks and in the last week, there’s been an abundant supply of them on the market.
“We’re seeing so many early onions because the Spanish growers are saying they’re not going to hold because it’s just too hot.
“They can’t risk leaving them out in these temperatures because they’ll just burn.”
As a result, there’s a big supply of onions at the moment but Leonard said we will “then see a gap in another week or two, because the onions we’re selling at the moment are the ones that we should be selling in two weeks’ time”.
“But we’re not selling them in two weeks’ time,” adds Leonard, “because the temperatures are too high, so the growers are harvesting them and getting them to market to get them sold.”
When asked to estimate the impact this will have on produce come September, Leonard said: “It hasn’t been a great spring, it hasn’t been a great summer, so I can more or less safely say that come September, we’re not going to have a bumper potato crop.”
He said the potato crop in Europe was down 30% last year, while the onion crop was down 30% and he further notes that “we didn’t have the temperatures last year that we currently have this year”.
“So if we lost 30% last year, we could be looking at 35% or 40% this year,” said Leonard.
Extreme weather is having even more of an impact for those in developing countries too.
While those in Ireland might face the prospect of not being able to access some foreign produce, those in the global south are facing food shortages.
Peter Thorne, a climatologist at Maynooth University, highlights how Ireland is protected by the EU single market and by EU policies.
“But if you talk to people in the Global South, food shortages are becoming almost a perennial problem,” he says.
Thorne added that the current heat waves are “hitting the great breadbaskets and food producing regions of the world that provide us staples”.
“This isn’t your ‘nice to have foods,’ but your fundamental food types, such as wheat and barley and rice, the things that fundamentally sustain us as a global society.”
The CEO of ActionAid Ireland Karol Balfe said countries in the Global South are “much more vulnerable to extreme weather and without any means to mitigate, adapt or recover against it”.
“The Horn of Africa is facing the worst drought in living memory,” said Balfe.
“Withering crops and dying livestock caused by unpredictable weather patterns, and persistent droughts caused by the escalating impacts of climate change, are leaving communities extremely vulnerable.
“With no way to make a living or feed their families, individuals travel far and wide in search of food and water.”
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