Saving the harvest - Is humanity responsible for floods?

THE dismal, grey weather, the unseasonal and seemingly inescapable rain has made this summer a washout.

Homes, farms and other businesses have been flooded, and though there is nothing terribly unusual about that, the severity and speed with which the floods became a threat to life and property was startling. They were mini versions of the floods that have devastated parts of continental Europe and Britain in recent years.

The floods that struck Newcastlewest in Limerick at the start of the month, and those that swamped Carlow town over the past few days, have been exceptional in their impact and speed.

Carlow town remains the worst affected area, while roads were flooded in Offaly, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Laois, Kerry, Cork and Galway. Parts of Carlow town were under almost two metres of floodwater yesterday after the River Barrow burst its banks.

All of this is beginning to have an impact beyond the areas hit by flooding, and now the dismal weather is threatening the country’s €400 million grain harvest.

In normal circumstances — a reasonably dry, sunny summer with dry underfoot conditions — the country’s 250,000 hectares of winter wheat and spring barley would be cut around this time. However, the deluge of 2008 has made that impossible in many places. Fields are waterlogged and access is very difficult, if not impossible in very many cases. Some crops are already in jeopardy, a significant acreage is already lodged and rotting on the ground because of the rain.

A severely diminished harvest would be another blow to the country’s 15,000 tillage farmers who are, like nearly every other business, feeling the pinch because of escalating chemical, fuel, energy and land costs.

Though last year’s excellent prices cushioned the blow caused by the loss of the market for sugar beet, a few short years ago those bumper prices are not expected to be repeated this year even though there has been a significant increase in input costs. Already there has been a cut of more than 20% per tonne in the price offered by distillers for malting barley.

For tillage farmers the impact of a poor harvest and reduced prices would be immediate: it would be a further blow to the confidence of an industry going through enormous and nearly everyday change.

For the rest of us it would increase our dependence on imports. As we have pointed out very many times before, we import 90% of our energy needs and a poor harvest would mean that we would have to import more food, be it for animal or human consumption.

There is a strengthening suggestion that because of climate change that these are the summer weather conditions that we may have to endure in the future. Yet we are slow to change our habits to counteract climate change, shrugging off suggestions saying that our contribution to the growing crisis is relatively small, so our contribution to confronting it would be equally small and pointless.

This is a convenient dodge and one we have to stop using. Though our situation is not as grave as that of the corncrake — which is facing extinction because its breeding grounds are either flooded or drained — it is well beyond the time that we took real, effective action to mend our ways.