by Luca Graziani
While the specter of nuclear power peeps out, Mario Draghi gets bogged down on the issue of price increases, but having to worry it’s not just the cost of energy. Climate change also comes into play, which has too often underestimated repercussions. From the July frosts in Brazil to the Canadian drought, extreme weather events are increasingly widespread and agricultural crops are at the expense. Sudden changes in temperature, extraordinary rainfall, African heat: during the past year around the world, crops have suffered enormous damage. The decline in production translated into dizzying price increases, dramatic if combined with the heavy consequences of Covid on the global economy.
A sharp drop in temperatures in the Brazilian summer hit sugar and coffee crops, never so expensive in the last seven years, while the great Canadian heat – in record 2021 – took it out on peas. Important protein substitutes for plant-based foods have seen their market price more than doubled. The same fate has befallen oats of which Canada is a major producer and exporter. Among the European victims, however, there is the Belgian potato hit by the great floods. It is mostly the neighboring German consumers who pay the price, because the price increases do not necessarily affect everyone.
In Italy to keep an eye on is the price of wheat, very low in recent months in Russian and Argentine fields, as well as in North America. The cost of cereals has returned to the levels of ten years ago, at the time of the great drought in the United States. With an increase in the price of pasta that will already reach 38% at the end of January, also due to the increase in energy costs, Italy will be able to sustain itself with only internal production? If this were not the case, within a few months Italian families will face yet another increase.
FAO is also thinking of raising the alarm about the disastrous year just ended. The UN agency, which updates its Ffpi (the index of food prices) on a monthly basis, in the latest surveys on 2021 photographs a dangerous uptrend: + 28.1% compared to the previous year, numbers that have not been seen since 2011. Thanks to the variants of the virus and the shortage of gas due to geopolitical skirmishes, of course. But also and above all, as the senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian points out, “the increasingly uncertain climatic conditions”.
Who knows, at least on this dossier, old Europe will not finally be able to move together. We would have to shout for a miracle, the second after the Recovery. It is now clear to everyone how the community dream is crumbling into a thousand particularities of its own under the weight of the great themes. Also divided on energy, between those who want coal and those who appeal to the atom, the great peaks increasingly often end in unpleasant stalemate. Because if on a global level we are far from the joint action that the climate crisis requires, even in our small European we do not try too much.