UK farmers consider quitting after extreme wet weather and low profits
UK farmers consider quitting after extreme wet weather and low profits
Farmers ‘on the brink’ after record rains, phasing out of EU subsidies and price volatility
If only they could have benefited from some sort of multi-national agricultural funding scheme.
An occasional bad season is one thing--a wise older farmer told me a long time back that "the bad years are the price of admission." However we've had a few bad seasons in a row with no end in sight.
Public impact is the problem. Right now the issues this causes are most visible to most people in "non-essential" foodstuffs. What happens when it becomes systemic and global for staple foods?
Here in Australia they hope for 1 in 10 to be exceptional and a few to break even. The rest are a loss to be endured.
That's challenging, my heart goes out to them.
Brought back memories of this article, well worth a read
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.