A month before veg started disappearing from British supermarket shelves, Steve Cornwell walked into a greenhouse in Morocco and realised we faced an unprecedented crisis.
The farmer, whose business supplies salad to chains like Aldi, Asda and the Cooperative, was visiting a site where tomatoes are normally ripe and ready for picking in January.
“I was gobsmacked,” says Steve, owner of MBJSC Produce in Waltham Abbey, Essex.
“Everything was green. Any other year you’d see it full of coloured fruit. You can’t harvest green tomatoes. You pick them when they’re breaking colour and I could see they were weeks away from that. I knew we had a big problem.”
It was the same all over Southern Europe, where during the winter Steve and wife Morna source supplies of everything from cucumbers to peppers.
But this year an unseasonal hot spell then an even more unusual cold spell has thrown production into chaos. He says: “Normally, you can trust the temperatures in Spain, Greece, Crete and Morocco. Between 12C and 15C at night and in the 20Cs in the day. But when I was there they were as low as 4C overnight. Most crops were not colouring up.
“Unusually warm weather from October to December meant crops matured quicker and had to be harvested earlier. So a lot of the winter crop had already gone by the time the temperature dropped, then we went from one extreme to the other.
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“In Spain it had even snowed and they had lost crop. The temperature is so low in Morocco the bees supposed to pollinate the tomato plants aren’t coming out of their boxes. In 50 years in the business it was the worst I’d ever known it.”
Steve says he tried to warn the supermarkets they would need to be prepared to pay more for produce or face shortages – but claims they refused to listen, adding: “I think they thought it was never going to happen.”
He says stores are now calling him, desperate to fill empty shelves. “One supermarket rang this morning asking for round tomatoes and offering the price that last month they said they couldn’t pay. If they had listened then, there wouldn’t be empty shelves. That delay meant the product went to European supermarkets instead.”
Yesterday, Lidl became the latest supermarket to limit sales of certain fruit and veg, like tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.
It follows similar moves from Aldi, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons – all retailers Steve and Morna, whose firm is part of the Lea Valley Growers’ Association, supplies.
Aldi and Tesco are limiting items to three per customer, while Morrisons is letting shoppers buy two each. Failing to tackle the crisis, Environment Secretary Therese Coffey was ridiculed last week after suggesting people should “cherish” turnips – which are not even in season now.
Steve and Morna know more than anyone about what is causing the shortages – as well as growing some of their own produce, they import from Europe to fulfil their contracts.
In normal years, their packing house works 12 hours a day, sending out 36,000 packs of cherry tomatoes alone. But this week their 40 staff are only working four hours a day due to the lack of produce arriving.
Morna says: “Last year there was a brief shortage of round tomatoes but this year it’s all the tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, all the salad lines.”
And it’s not just due to the bad weather. Mona explains: “It’s compounded by all sorts of issues. In Europe, supermarkets set prices weekly, so if the market is short they’ll pay the higher prices.
But British supermarkets still insist on setting a price for the whole season and then are reluctant to increase them, so they end up missing out on the produce.”
Morna says Brexit has also fuelled the crisis. “Transport companies don’t want to come to the UK because of all the paperwork and logistics, the visas they need for all their drivers.
On top of that, our growers in Morocco have to pay a 3.5% duty on imports to the UK, which in July will rise to 5.7%. Yet to send their produce to the EU in the winter they don’t pay any duty.”
The biggest threat to growers like Steve and Morna, though, has been the huge hikes in energy prices. The cost of keeping gas boilers going to heat their four cucumber nurseries has risen threefold since last year.
It meant that this year, they planted a month later to save costs – and as a result there is still no sign of cucumbers on their plants.
Steve says: “We used to plant the second week in January, it was a gamble we could take as the energy costs were kinder. But this year we couldn’t risk it. Everything has gone up, transport costs, diesel, packaging. It’s just become untenable unless you get increases in your values.”
Others, however, have been hit even harder. In the Lea Valley, once known as the UK’s cucumber capital, 20 of the 80 growers in the association have shut completely. Among them are two brothers who until last year supplied cucumbers to Steve and Mona.
The brothers, who do not want to be named, knew they would not last when oil and electricity prices soared.
One says: “This time of year you have to put 20,000 litres of oil in the heaters. And prices got so high that meant £20,000 a week in oil alone. Electricity has also risen four times what it was. We didn’t know if supermarkets would pay a much higher price, so it just wasn’t worth the risk.
“It’s depressing, after all these years knowing we can’t make a living here.
“I’ve been doing this since 1977, I’ve gone from doing something to not knowing what I’m going to do.”
Steve warns we risk sleepwalking into a food supply catastrophe if the Government fails to support farmers.
He says: “We don’t feel growers get enough support. In fact, I don’t think the Government thinks about the industry at all, until times like this when the horse has already bolted.
“Like the supermarkets, they think these problems will go away. But they won’t, it will get worse. In European countries, governments support their food growers, they provide subsidies, help with energy bills. They treat it like a serious industry. That’s what we want from our Government.”
