UK drought: crop harvests at severe risk of collapse

England is in an official drought, with water restrictions now looming and farms reporting increasingly poor crop conditions. Per The Conversation, agricultural researcher Sven Batke argues the underlying vulnerability runs much deeper than weather alone. The UK has long relied on imports for much of its fresh produce—just sixteen percent of fruit and roughly half its vegetables are grown domestically—while the infrastructure producing food here is aging rapidly. Seventy percent of Britain's commercial greenhouses are now more than forty years old, and investment in renewal has lagged far behind international competitors. Batke proposes the UK adopt a food resilience index, similar to how the aviation industry continuously monitors aircraft health before problems develop into failures. By tracking domestic production capacity, import dependency, energy costs, and infrastructure investment together, such an index would signal growing vulnerabilities long before droughts translate into empty supermarket shelves and higher prices.

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