At a farm near my home in Oxfordshire, 50 sheep died in last week's floods. Another farm, where the locals buy pick-your-own strawberries, asparagus and broad beans, has almost certainly lost its entire crop. I haven't the heart to ask what it's like in Gloucestershire. Of course, sheep and strawberries aren't the crops that actually feed people. The staple foods are the cereals. We will have to see over the next few weeks if Britain still has any wheat or barley worth harvesting. But there is nothing special about Britain. It's all part of the global pattern some scientists have been forecasting for decades, and which many in positions of influence have chosen to ignore, scorn, or lie about. The climate is indeed changing. We will never see "normal" times again - or at least not for many centuries - and agriculture, our food supply, is in the firing line. Sometimes the weather will be too dry, sometimes too wet, and although it will generally be warmer it is likely in some places to be colder than ever remembered. The "good" and "normal" years will be the aberrations.
So it was that in 2006 Australia lost half its grain to drought. Yields were down in all the major wheatbelts - the EU, US, Canada and the Ukraine. Wheat, together with rice and maize, provides humanity with half our calories and two-thirds of our protein. At present the world's stocks of wheat and maize are at a historic low.
Meanwhile the world's livestock continues to multiply - and increasingly is fed on grain. Half the world's wheat, 80% of the maize, most of the barley that is not grown for brewing and 90% of the world's soya are earmarked for cattle, pigs and poultry. Biofuel is growing too, and is seen to be virtuous. China is poised to double its imports of oilseeds and Brazil should soon overtake the US as the greatest oilseed exporter. Oilseeds for fuel compete with food crops for fertile land - or, in Brazil and Indonesia, are grown at the expense of the tropical forest that is our greatest hope of ameliorating climate change by soaking up the surplus CO2.
But never mind - shortage is good for business. Wheat prices now are 40% higher than the average of the past decade, the price of US maize last year was up by 30%, and, I suspect, we ain't seen nothing yet. This does wonders for GDP and the economic growth by which governments measure their success. Our government is equally wedded to the notion that farming, like everything else, must return the biggest possible buck. Many a Treasury buff has been suggesting that because it is cheaper to buy food from Brazil and Africa, where there is more space and sunshine and the labourers demand less, then that is what we should do. Statistics are presented to show that Britain's farming should go the way of its coal-mining, and it probably would have done already if it weren't that farms tend to be owned by influential people. The failure of UK crops this year will doubtless reinforce this view - why grow crops in a place that has become so fickle?
EDIT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2138135,00.html
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