How extreme rain from climate change is ruining potato crops, driving up prices and leaving farmers in deep water
- Hundreds of thousands of tons of potatoes failed to make it to market in Europe in 2023, a region that eats about 90kg per capita per year – the world’s highest
- English white potato prices are up 81 per cent year-over-year, an all-time high, according to one data provider
In 2023, the word to describe much of the spike in food prices would have been “heatflation”, as drought and high temperatures affected crop yields around the world, from olive oil in Spain to cabbage in South Korea.
This year we are facing a different concept, still undeniably linked to the climate crisis. Let’s call it “sogflation”. If heatflation refers to price increases as a result of excessively high temperatures, sogflation is borne out of extreme precipitation.
A report published in April, by the European Union’s Copernicus climate monitoring service and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), showed that in 2023, while Europe experienced the highest number of days with extreme heat stress, it was also one of the wettest periods on record for many places. The continent received 7 per cent more precipitation than the 1991-2020 average, with 1.6 million people affected by flooding.
It does not take a horticulturalist to understand that waterlogged fields are not conducive to a productive harvest or plentiful seed-planting.
Potatoes are at the forefront of sogflation. With just one planting and one harvest per year, the conditions have to be just right. But in autumn 2023, poor weather forced harvesting to stop in Europe after just three weeks, as sodden soil meant farmers could not get crops out of the ground.