Climate change: yes we have no tomatoes

By Richard North - February 23, 2023

There must be some glum faces in the BBC newsrooms as they report the shortage of some imported vegetables and fruits in British shops and rationing in most of the major supermarket chains.

Not only are they unable to blame Brexit, as they were quick to do, before the event, they are having to concede that the shortage is down to “bad weather” in Europe and Africa.

Always keen to promote the climate change schtick, it must really have pained business reporter Beth Timmins to admit that Southern Spain has been suffering “unusually cold weather”, only she evidently couldn’t bring herself to admit that the cold had spread to Morocco, and with it the frosts and snow. All she could bear to report what that in the crop-growing regions, yields had been “affected by floods”.

At least the climate-obsessed iNews is a little more up-front with the weather issue, offering the headline, “Vegetable shortages: How cold snap in Spain led to rationed tomatoes and cucumbers in UK supermarkets”, adding with an amount of candour which escaped the BBC a sub-heading declaring that: “With more snow forecast, Spanish farmers warn supply of fruit and vegetables ‘is at serious risk’”.

“This season will not go down in history as being normal for the greenhouses growers in Almeria”, said a spokesperson for the region’s Association of Organisations of Fruit and Vegetable Producers (Coexphal), employing a British level of understatement.

“First”, he said, “the high temperatures recorded in autumn and a warm start of the winter, and now the persistent low temperatures, have caused an unusual panorama that is leading to a generalised lack fruit and vegetable products”. Continuing in the same vein, he added: “The supply of fruit and vegetables in Europe is at serious risk at the moment”.

What none of the British media seem to have been able to do, though, is report just how bad the weather has been in Morocco, leaving it to Madrid-based Atalayar to inform us that a snowstorm in Morocco has left 87 villages isolated and 24,000 people in need of assistance.

The southeast of Morocco, apparently, has been experiencing unprecedented snows since the weekend. In the High Atlas mountain region of Ouarzazate, snowfall actually reached 2.2 metres (over seven feet, in real money), cutting off 9,000 families.

For the crop-growing regions, it has been a “perfect storm” of flooding, cold temperatures and a number of ferries cancelled due to bad weather, which have severely affected volumes of tomatoes reaching the UK.

To complicate matters further, we are told, Moroccan producers are contending with the emergence of tomato pathogen ToBRV, which has seriously affected tomato yields in a number of countries in recent years.

And, although the issue has only just hit the UK headlines, it seems that production problems in Morocco started in January with unusually cold night-time temperatures that affected tomato ripening.

The cold weather is said to have been probably the worst that Moroccan tomato sector has seen for five years. This, with a lack of sunlight, caused plants to “switch off” and stop growing. The ferry cancellations happened between 9 and 12 February, which led to long tailbacks of vehicles trying to cross from the Port of Tangier in Morocco to the Port of Algeciras in Spain.

“The lorries that got stuck were taking two or three days to get to the port and across into Spain,” according to one shipper, who said: “We had goods to load on Monday that didn’t land until Thursday because there was a lack of vehicles – they were all in the wrong places because of the issues last week”. More ferries to Spain were cancelled on 17 February due to adverse weather.

In the meantime, to add to the already severe problems, supply issues were exacerbated by heavy rain from 15 to 17 February, which caused flooding in the Souss Valley near Agadir, the country’s tomato heartland.

Interestingly, the Guardian – which runs a daily section on the “Climate crisis”, in which it lovingly records extreme weather events – couldn’t bring itself to mention the snowfalls, limiting itself to a brief mention of “unusually cold weather last month, including intense night frosts”, with nothing of the more recent problems this month.

This is typical of this newspaper which, at the merest hint of a warming-related story is all over it like a bad smell, yet seems reluctant to give the same prominence to cold weather events.

The paper has, for instance, given far more prominence to the lack of snow in Alpine ski resorts than it is devoting to the wild weather being experienced in Canada and the United States, where more than 75 million Americans are under winter weather alerts.

Many schools throughout the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin were called off for Wednesday, ahead of the storm. Offices closed, and so did the Minnesota Legislature, which is not scheduled to reconvene until the coming Monday. Emergency management leaders have warned people to stay off the roads or face potential “whiteout” conditions, while more than 1,000 US flights have been cancelled,

Furthermore, conditions are set to get worse. Blizzard warnings have been issued for more two million people across the United States, which extend unusually to the mountains around Los Angeles.

Almost all of the country, says the New York Times, is experiencing some form of notable weather this week. While much of the eastern half of North America is basking in spring-like weather, a major winter storm is taking hold of the western half, from Southern California to Toronto.

Conditions are so bad that even the BBC has been forced to notice, reporting “rare snowfall in California” on its news website, although you would struggle to find this detail on any of its broadcast bulletins.

The website is also recording that Minneapolis faces the likelihood of one of the city’s top three snowfall events of all time. As the storm sweeps east and intensifies, we are told, it will dump snow at a rate of up to two inches (5cm) per hour. Minnesota may receive as much as 25 inches (64cm) of snowfall through Thursday.

With high wind gusts also predicted, the weather service in the Minneapolis-Twin Cities area has warned of “life-threatening travel disruptions” as well as potential power outages and tree damage.

Fortunately for the warmists, temperatures will hit record highs for the month of February in hundreds of US cities across the central and eastern US. Cities like Atlanta, Georgia and Nashville, Tennessee will see temperatures reach about 77ºF (25ºC) by Thursday, while cities in Florida could hit peaks above 86ºF (30ºC) – usually not seen until May or June. No doubt, this will be painstakingly recorded in the Guardian.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, despite the weather-related problems, the Telegraph has managed to find a writer to blame the fruit and vegetable shortages on “net zero”, although this seems to represent a “click-bait” headline rather than the content of his piece.

However, the claim is made that, with support, British farmers could fill the gap – which is unlikely – although the writer does suggest that we need to make more effort to eat seasonal produce. And without global warming, it seems, that fare will be very thin indeed.