Dealing with drought and the future of agriculture

The im­pact of the drought goes far be­yond the di­rect con­se­quences for crops and the farm­ing sec­tor. To be­lieve that it will just be a bad year for har­vests is to dan­ger­ously ig­nore the chal­lenge fac­ing us, which threat­ens to af­fect the model of life that our so­ci­ety has been build­ing for cen­turies. Glob­al­i­sa­tion made us be­lieve that we were in­vul­ner­a­ble to re­gional crises; if one year our ce­re­als or fruits failed, we would get them from some­where else. And so we con­tin­ued to fill our shop­ping bas­kets with­out notic­ing any­thing dif­fer­ent, not even in the price. But things are chang­ing, and al­though the per­cep­tion is that these changes are sud­den, the re­al­ity is quite dif­fer­ent. And farm­ers know that. Gov­ern­ment ne­glect of the pri­mary sec­tor is not sud­den, es­pe­cially in terms of pre­vent­ing sit­u­a­tions like the ones we are suf­fer­ing now. It is para­dox­i­cal that our so­ci­ety is more sen­si­tive than ever to cli­mate change, that al­most all po­lit­i­cal par­ties, with the ex­cep­tion of the far-right, recog­nise the in­flu­ence human ac­tiv­ity in this re­gard, and that all pow­ers - local, re­gional, na­tional, Eu­ro­pean and global - agree to agen­das, sum­mits and poli­cies aimed at re­vers­ing its ef­fects... while at the same time, the spe­cific poli­cies that should pre­pare us to deal with it ef­fec­tively are so slow or, worse, non-ex­is­tent.

The lack of water in this part of the planet is some­thing ex­perts have been warn­ing of for decades, but it is clear that the nec­es­sary home­work has not been done. The im­pact will no longer be felt only by farm­ers, that in­vis­i­ble sec­tor ab­sent from the dis­courses of most “urban” ide­olo­gies, but by the whole of so­ci­ety. Prices will rise and farm­ers will quit or find it un­sus­tain­able. The chain of ef­fects that will fol­low will reach the hearts of cities. Until now, glob­al­i­sa­tion cor­rected this. But water scarcity is a phe­nom­e­non that is in­creas­ing all over the planet, and de­car­bon­i­sa­tion poli­cies to com­bat the in­crease in global tem­per­a­tures will make the lo­gis­tics on which glob­al­i­sa­tion works less and less com­pet­i­tive (and ad­vis­able).