Supermarkets deny climate change

The halting supply of lettuce, spinach and broccoli from Spain has already been forgotten and the shelves are full again. Supermarket chains in Europe are doing everything they can to keep their consumers' shopping carts full. Isn't it time for retail to change its mind?

The lack of fresh vegetables from Spain cost the UK supermarket sector an estimated £8million in January. Converted about 9,4 million euros. To keep the shelves stocked, lettuce, courgettes and spinach are flown in from the US. Why do they prefer to sell loss-making vegetables instead of selling no?

Importing 1 calorie of food from California to the UK costs 127 calories in jet fuel. Yet supermarkets would rather take that step than empty a shelf, writes The Guardian. The reason for this lies with the 'Permanent Global Summer Time'. The idea that it is summer 365 days a year and you can always buy fresh fruit and vegetables at your local supermarket. The fresh produce department is the showpiece of every store. If the shelves there are empty, it won't be good elsewhere in the store either. The foundation for this was laid XNUMX years ago.

Perhaps this picture needs to be adjusted when we take climate change into account. It seems that we will have to deal with weather influences such as rain, snow and frost much more often in Spain and Italy. The powerful supermarket chains cannot compete with that either. The British have an additional disadvantage that they have become very dependent on expensive imports after Brexit.

A third industrial revolution in the 80s made it possible for retail chains to build up huge central stocks in distribution centers. With the help of computer systems, stores can be stocked, increasing the product range from 8.000 to 40.000 different products. Small shops cannot fight against this and have disappeared from the streets.

With the accession of Spain, Portugal and Greece to the European Union in 1986, the road network to and from Southern Europe was greatly improved by injecting European subsidies. A refrigerated truck with fresh vegetables can quickly be found in the Netherlands, England or Germany. During the XNUMXs, the transport of agricultural goods between mainland Europe and the UK increased by XNUMX percent. This makes the country the sixth largest importer of 'virtual water'. Water that is needed elsewhere on the planet to grow crops. A major additional disadvantage is the emission of greenhouse gases.

The system of growing crops in the winter in Southern Europe has two major problems. First, it builds on finite resources such as water, soil and fossil fuels. In addition, reliance is placed on cheap labour. Mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe. For Spain and Italy, these are Africans who have to do a lot of work in a short time for a low wage to supply Western Europe with fresh vegetables. Seventy to eighty percent of all food in the UK is harvested by foreign seasonal workers. 35 percent is processed by their hands.

The author states that the short supply stop for vegetables from southern Europe is a warning sign for the near future. The fact that weather extremes can affect our supermarket shelves should be taken seriously. The chains themselves have already carefully started to make a pre-selection of vegetables that are no longer interesting to import. For example asparagus from Peru. A shortage of water in particular is an important cause worldwide for stopping food imports.

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