Thus, crops so traditional for the life of Europeans, such as Spanish olives or mustard in France, are affected.
Spain is running out of ‘green gold’
In scorching heat, Felipe Elvira inspects the branches of his olive trees that stretch as far as the eye can see on a dusty hillside in southern Spain. “In these, there are no olives. It’s all dry,” he says worriedly.
Owner with his son of a 100-hectare farm in Jaén, the cradle of olive oil in Andalusia, this 68-year-old olive grower risks losing a large part of his harvest due to the extreme drought the country is experiencing. .
“Here we are used to drought, but to this degree, no,” sighs this sixty-year-old with a checkered shirt, white hair and bushy eyebrows. “Before, 800 liters of water fell per square meter per year. Now, we’re going to have 300 or 400 liters, nothing more… It’s raining less and less,” he laments.
On the front line of Europe in the face of the effects of climate change, Spain has suffered three exceptional heat waves since May, which have further weakened crops which had already suffered a drier than normal winter.
“Olive trees are very resistant to water stress,” says Juan Carlos Hervás, agricultural engineer at COAG agricultural union. But when there is high heat “they activate physiological mechanisms to protect themselves: they do not die, but production does not take place”, he adds.
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