Fruit consumption rises, but the harvest is damaged by the runaway climate
As if the price increases weren’t enough, the abnormal heat: temperatures over 40 degrees and the scorching wind know burning the fruit on the trees, causing losses of up to 15% of the total crop. This is what emerges from the monitoring of Coldiretti on the effects of heat bubble which is enveloping Italy with a red ball for 19 cities, while the drought besieges the fields. A dramatic scenario that involves different parts of the national territory from north to south with damage to the cherries in Puglia and Emilia Romagna, watermelons and melons and scorched by the heat in Veneto, pears and apricots ruined in the Ferrara area, rooted cuttings burnt that lose their leaves in the Tuscan vineyards around Florencepeaches suffocated by the heat that fall from the branches before being able to fully develop and young olive trees in water stress.
In some areas of the country, farmers have resorted to emergency irrigation to save the crops most suffering, even if in some areas farmers find themselves even fruit on the trees baked by the sun and from the bubble of hot air. A situation that does rise to three billion the account of the damage caused in 2022 to Italian agriculture by drought and the exceptional heat wave after last year due to extreme events Italy had already said goodbye to one in four of its national production. We are also facing the consequences in Italy – underlines Coldiretti – climate changes with a tendency to tropicalization with the rapid and traumatic transition from bad weather to African heat with a higher frequency of violent events, seasonal delays, short and intense rainfall.
The jump in temperatures over 40 degrees with Charon who is laying siege to cities and countryside has done explode the consumption of fruit and vegetables on the tables of Italians in the last seven days with an average increase of + 20%. Fruit and vegetables – explains Coldiretti – is the first item of expenditure for Italians for an average of almost 108 euros per month, for a total quantity of about 5.9 million tons last year. Fruits and vegetables – explains Coldiretti – are foods that satisfy multiple needs of the body: they nourish, quench thirst, replenish the mineral salts lost with sweat, supply vitamins, keep the intestinal system efficient with their intake of fibers and oppose to the action of free radicals produced in the body by exposure to the sun, in the most natural and appetizing way possible.
The national fruit and vegetable sector guarantees Italy 440 thousand jobs, equal to 40% of the total in agriculture, with a turnover of 15 billion euros per year between fresh and processed, equal to 25% of total agricultural production, thanks to the activity of over 300 thousand farms on more than one million hectares cultivated in Italy and boasts 113 fruit and vegetables PDO and Igp.
“To defend the Italian fruit and vegetable heritage it is necessary to intervene to contain the expensive energy and production costs with immediate and structural interventions to plan the future” says the president of Coldiretti Ettore Prandini underlining that against drought and the effects of climate change it is necessary to start as soon as possible “the great national plan for reservoirs that Coldiretti has been proposing for some time to recover and reuse up to 50% of rainwater against the current 11%, avoiding as well as crisis situations such as the one we are suffering also this year “.
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