By Julia Hayley
CLOUDLESS skies over much of Spain may cheer tourists and hikers, but farmers are deeply concerned as the country faces the second year of what could be a prolonged drought.
Rain in recent weeks, even if way below the historical average for the month, has been enough to moisten the soil for sowing winter wheat and barley, which need no irrigation.
“Sowing conditions for wheat and barley were good and there’s plenty of humidity in the soil,” said a spokeswoman for the farmers’ association ASAJA.
“But water levels are very low and I don’t even want to think what problems there will be for crops like maize and for fruit and vegetables that need irrigation,” she added.
Farmers do not usually start plant maize until March or April so it is too early for them to decide how much to sow, ASAJA specialist Jesus Rivera said.
In February the seed sellers will have an idea of demand for maize seed, but they sometimes give buyers the option of returning what they do not use.
The 2005 maize harvest is estimated to have dropped 17% to just under 4mn tonnes, with bigger falls in key growing areas like the Ebro river valley, Catalonia and Aragon.
This year, there is likely to be a further fall, traders say, because farmers will not plant if they are in doubt about water supplies.
Urban water takes priority over farm irrigation, which is likely to be tightly restricted this year.
Grain prices have come down in recent weeks because of the pressure on intermediaries to shift goods from port stores, which are chock-full with imported grain.
“Now they have steadied and should stay where they are until March or April when people start to get nervous about the outlook for this year’s harvest,” a trader in Seville said.
Reservoirs are 47% full on average after the recent rains, the environment ministry said earlier this week.
But that figure hides wide disparities between lakes in the wet north, which are up to 95% full, and those in the Segura basin in the southeast, which are almost 90% empty.
There are few connections between the different hydrological basins. The Tagus basin can supply the Segura, but the Tagus reservoirs are only 42% full and have to provide for the Madrid region’s 6mn inhabitants.
The hydrological year ended last August was the worst since records began almost 60 years ago and the current year could be as bad, the meteorological office has warned.
Consecutive dry years are not unusual in Mediterranean climates. Spain’s last drought went on for five years in the 1990s.
The factor that has worsened the situation since then is growing demand.
“Consumption per person and per hectare of irrigated agricultural land has fallen, but the population and the area irrigated has grown, so global consumption is rising,” said a spokesman for the environmental group Ecologists in Action.
“It’s not looking good. The situation is very tricky. This has started out as another dry year,” said an Environment Ministry spokesman.
“We could be facing further restrictions. We’ll have to wait and see how much it rains in spring,” he added. – Reuters
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