Extreme heat adds pressure to food supplies already hit by war

The scorching heat sweeping Europe has parched soils, distressed livestock and is keeping farmers away from fields, superseding the Iran war as the greatest challenge to food supplies.
In France, record-breaking temperatures are damaging corn crops and wiping out hundreds of thousands of chickens. In Spain, pigs are losing their appetite and some fruit is threatened at the key blossoming stage. In the UK, distressed cows are producing less milk.

Though the heat wave will ease by early next week, extreme weather has overshadowed the Middle East conflict as the biggest concern for farmers. Meteorologists are warning of above-normal temperatures for months to come as a developing El Niño compounds the impact of climate change for an industry already facing high fertilizer and fuel costs.


“The next shock to the farmer is potential adverse weather in some parts of the world,” said Les Finemore, chief investment officer at Moreton Capital Partners, which is starting a fund specifically trading El Niño crop risks. “We’ve been focused on the Iranian war situation. The next event will be El Niño.”

El Niño — a climate phenomenon that disrupts normal weather patterns every few years — has contributed to the heat wave across western Europe. This week, temperature highs were reached in the UK and France, where a record 72 departments are under red heat alerts, with similar warnings in effect in the UK, Germany and Switzerland.

Beyond Europe, El Niño is already impacting Asia’s food supplies. In India, it’s delayed the monsoon and reduced rainfall, a risk to rice and sugar. And in Vietnam, parts of the coffee belt are drying up.

Heavy downpours could disrupt grain production in China at a time when imports are under scrutiny. In the US, the weather is also turning hotter, a challenge for its grain farmers.

“Even if energy and fertilizer markets normalize, adverse weather conditions in major producing regions could still tighten supplies and place upward pressure on food prices,” Máximo Torero, chief economist at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, said by email.

France, Europe’s top farming nation, has been the epicenter of the heat wave for more than a week, straining a corn crop that farmers finished planting just weeks ago.

“Some of my corn crops look stressed, with darker color and their structure has changed. They look less like corn and more like leeks,” Franck Laborde, a farmer in Pyrénées-Atlantiques in southwest France, said by phone. “When it is very hot, we need to drink more water. The same applies to corn.”

Water stress is likely to become the major issue, especially as the first corn crops are entering a sensitive flowering stage, he said. Farmers had already curbed plantings after the Iran war boosted input costs. With potentially less than one-third of the French corn area irrigated, harvests this year could be the smallest since 1990, market researcher Expana estimates.

As soaring temperatures threaten to dry vegetation and fuel dangerous wildfire conditions, the French government has also rushed to secure livestock feed supplies for farmers.

Hundreds of thousands of animals have already died, according to Yann Nédélec, general director of France’s poultry meat industry group Anvol. He said the toll could end up even higher, with Brittany and Pays de la Loire — areas not used to extreme temperatures — badly impacted.

“Unlike humans, birds do not sweat, so they can only regulate their body temperature through their respiratory system,” he said.

In the heat, animals get distressed and lose their appetite. Cows produce less milk and pigs fatten more slowly. In central Spain, Europe’s top pork supplier, pig farmer Pedro Matarranz Herrero has humidifiers and cooling systems inside the barn. But with such high temperatures, nothing seems to work.

“When animals eat less, it takes longer for them to reach their target weight,” he said by phone from Cantimpalos in the province of Castilla y León. “They do not eat in the same way. They eat less, which makes it harder to raise and grow them efficiently.”

European farming loses an average of more than €28 billion ($32 billion) a year to extreme weather, pushing farmers to try to adapt.

Sophie Gregory, a dairy farmer in Dorset, in southern England, has been planning for the heat for several years, including making more water available for her cows on hot days.

“We make the most of shade from trees, get jobs done early in the morning and later in the evening, don’t rush the cows, and have a misting system and fans on full blast in the milking parlor,” she said.

The heat wave also comes at a crucial time for many fruit and vegetable growers, threatening pollination and delicate flowers. In Spain’s western region of Extremadura, tomatoes and corn are at particular risk, according to Luis Cortés at farm association Unión de Uniones.

Sustained heat can take its toll on berry yields, with fruit ripening at a smaller average size, though berries are fairly heat-tolerant, according to Nick Marston at the British Berry Growers Association.

In the UK, salad grower Ben Andrews worries that premature flowering due to the heat could make his lettuces unsellable. Global warming threatens to make that a perennial problem.

“Shoppers might see a shortage of one product on the shelves and not think things are too bad,” said Andrews, who also grows kale in Herefordshire, England. “But climate change is wreaking havoc on our ability to grow all food consistently, with big financial impacts on farming families.”