SHARE
COPY LINK
For members

SPAIN AND THE UK

Has Spain’s weather really caused fresh food shortages in UK supermarkets?

UK supermarket rationing of fresh produce such as tomatoes and peppers has been largely blamed on bad weather in Spain. But are Spanish supermarkets suffering the same shortages or is there another reason for the UK's problems?

Has Spain's weather really caused fresh food shortages in UK supermarkets?
There is no evidence of a shortage of fresh produce in Spanish supermarkets and markets, with the shelves filled up to their usual standards. (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA / AFP)

The United Kingdom is in the midst of a huge shortage of certain vegetables and fruit, with supermarket chains such as Morrisons and Asda deciding to limit the sale of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and raspberries to two or three items or trays per shopper. 

Adverse weather conditions in Spain and Morocco, where the UK gets much of its fresh produce during the winter months, has been largely blamed for the scarcity of certain fresh produce.

“It’s been snowing and hailing in Spain, it was hailing in North Africa last week – that is wiping out a large proportion of those crops,” executive director of upmarket supermarket Waitrose James Bailey told the UK’s LBC Radio. 

Spain has indeed had periods of extremely cold weather and heavy rain in January and February, and another “polar front” is forecast in the coming days. Even in sunny southeast Spain where much of the country’s fruit and vegetables are grown, temperatures dropped well below zero on several consecutive nights in January.

But there is no evidence of a shortage of fresh produce in Spanish supermarkets and markets, with the shelves filled up to their usual standards. 

A number of Britons based in Spain have shared videos of their local supermercados (supermarkets) to highlight how their fruit and vegetable aisles are awash with tomatoes and peppers.

This has raised the question of whether increased energy costs for UK farmers and Brexit’s impact on the recruitment of foreign agricultural workers are playing a bigger role in the United Kingdom’s current food shortages and inability to grow more of its own produce, along with the added red tape for EU farmers exporting to the UK.

That’s not to say that adverse weather hasn’t had an impact on harvests in southeast Spain, where the UK gets 20 percent of its tomatoes from. 

There are also reports that the supply of vegetables to Ireland is being disrupted by Spain’s bad weather and high energy costs.

According to Coexphal, the Association of Organisations of Fruit and Vegetable Producers of Almería, a warm autumn and early winter followed by “persevering” low temperatures are putting the supply of fruit and vegetables across Europe “at risk”. 

The group cites a 22 percent drop in tomato harvests, 25 percent fewer peppers, a 21 percent decrease in cucumber numbers and a 15 percent reduction in zucchini numbers.

The video below posted by an Almería farmer in January shows how his pepper crops suffered due to temperatures of as low as -4 C, despite the double layer of greenhouse plastic sheeting and other protective measures.

“Currently, practically the only European region where fruit and vegetables are produced is the Spanish southeast and we’re going to great lengths to meet this demand,” Coexphal manager Luis Miguel Fernández was quoted as saying by Spanish news agency Europa Press.

A vast swathe of agricultural land in Almería province is referred to as the ‘sea of plastic’ (mar de plástico) given that the sheer amount of greenhouse plastic sheets that are visible from space, and are responsible for 40 percent of Spain’s fruit and vegetable exports. 

READ MORE: What is Spain’s ‘sea of plastic’ and how important is it to the UK’s food supply?

Practically all of the produce stays in Europe (99.5 percent, 81 percent in the EU in 2021) with the main export markets being Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Poland. 

Almería has therefore come to be known as ‘Europe’s vegetable patch’, helping to consolidate Spain as the main producer of vegetables and fruits in the EU in 2020 and 2021.

So it’s no surprise that any harvesting issue they face has the potential to be felt across the continent.

But why is the UK being impacted more greatly than other European nations? Is Brexit really the defining factor or has it been a combination of different circumstances that are to blame?

Perhaps the best interpretation is that of Pekka Pesonen, Secretary General of agricultural group Copa-Cogeca, who told Euronews that the UK should be wary of “tipping the delicate balance of trade channel” and that “even if it’s a minor change to the supply routes and supply chains, it may have a significant impact through operators that opt for the easier way somewhere else”.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

FOOD AND DRINK

How hi-tech hops are keeping beer bitter in Spain as climate bites

Outside a warehouse in northwestern Spain, it's a freezing, foggy morning but inside it's balmy, the warmth and LED lights fooling 360 hop plants to flower as if it were late August.

How hi-tech hops are keeping beer bitter in Spain as climate bites

Mounted on a soaring grid system of cables and wire, these vigorous climbing plants are in full flower, covered in delicate papery-green hops which are prized for giving beer its unique aroma and crisp, refreshing bitterness.

Normally farmed outside, the hop plants are part of a unique indoor farming project by Spanish startup Ekonoke, which has developed an alternative way to cultivate this climate-vulnerable crop in order to protect the drinkability of beer.

Experts say rising temperatures and increased droughts have made Europe’s hop harvests increasingly unpredictable, lowering yields and reducing the quality of the alpha acids in its resins and oils that are so crucial to the taste and character of different beers.

“Climate change is affecting the field, and last year we were down 40 percent on hop production in Europe,” said Giacomo Guala, policy adviser on hops for Copa-Cogeca, which groups the European Union’s main farmers unions.

“You don’t get rain when you’re supposed to, or too much rain when you’re not supposed to, so that predictability is no longer there,” he told AFP.

Hi-tech hops

Brewers are already feeling that unpredictability.

Having a stable supply of hops was “crucial” as there was no alternative to give that bitterness, explained Jose Luis Olmedo, head of research and development at Cosecha de Galicia, the innovation arm of Spanish brewer Hijos de Rivera, which makes Estrella Galicia beer.

Reliant until now on field-grown hops, the Galicia-based brewer quickly saw the potential of the indoor hops grown by Ekonoke.

When the startup raised €4.2 million in investment rounds in 2022, it said “a significant” chunk of it came from the brewer.

An employee hand-picks indoor-grown hops during harvest at Ekonoke company’s facility. (Photo by Brais Lorenzo / AFP)

It also caught the attention of the world’s largest brewer AB InBev, joining its startup accelerator programme.

“What brewers are most interested in is the guaranteed supply of quantity and quality,” said Ekonoke chief executive Ines Sagrario at their 1,200-square-metre (13,000-square-foot) pilot farm in Chantada, where they harvested their first crop in mid-February.

They began trials at their Madrid lab in 2019, starting with four plants and scaling to 24, slashing the growing time and using “15 times less water” than outdoors, while aiming “to reach 20”.

“In this warehouse, we control all the environmental and nutrient parameters and the lighting factors, using LED lights to provide the plant what it needs when it needs it,” said Sagrario.

The lights replicate the different colours and intensity of sunlight at each stage of the growth cycle when they bathe the rapidly growing plants in an ambient purple glow.

Halving the growth cycle

The heady scent of hops permeates the air as a huge bine laden with hop cones is cut from its trellis, tumbling to the floor before being carried out to a red harvesting machine.

Grown without soil, the bines are fed by a closed system that allows constant reuse of the nutrient-infused water and doesn’t use pesticides, relying instead on tightly controlled access protocols.

“In the field, although the cycle is six months, they can only harvest once a year, because you need the correct growing conditions,” said agronomist and chief operations officer Ana Saez.

Ana Saez, 45, agronomist and chief operating officer, harvests indoor-grown hops at Ekonoke. (Photo by Brais Lorenzo / AFP)

“Here, as we can control and replicate ‘spring’, we’ve reduced the crop cycle to three months.”

Multiple trials had shown their hops contained “more alpha acids per kilogram” than those in the field, Saez said, pointing to the abundance of yellow powdery lupulin clinging to the cones.

By summer, three grow rooms will be operational with more than 1,000 plants maturing on a staggered basis.

“Once we finish learning everything we need to learn in this pilot, we will be building a full-scale industrial facility with 12,000 square metres of growing area,” said Sagrario, whose 12-strong team has so far managed to replicate five different hop cultivars.

For Hijos de Rivera, it’s a project of “strategic” importance, with the brewer planning to have the facility fully operational “by the end of 2025”, said Olmedo.

Mirek Trnka, a bioclimatologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences, said hydroponics was one solution, but scaling up to meet market demands would be tricky.

“Even though the hop is a minority crop, you’d have to upsize operations quite significantly to match the current production globally by hydroponic growth,” he told AFP.

At Ekonoke, they see their role as using science and technology to protect the hops’ biodiversity and eventually developing new hybrids “to give more quantity and quality using less resources”.

“People ask us if hop farmers outdoors feel threatened by us, but we’re not threatening them. Climate change is threatening them,” said Sagrario.

SHOW COMMENTS