Meanwhile, the drought and climate change are leaving a dent on all our productions, including all the ones that we have talked about in this edition (onions, apples and oranges). The truth is that it is a concern common to agriculture as a whole. In January, Catalonia will start to receive ships bringing in water, and the same will happen in Malaga next summer if the rains don’t come. The reservoirs in both regional communities are below 20% of their capacity, and Spain is on its way to becoming an outlying region of Africa.
And we have just seen the end of another climate summit, the COP28, with results that some are applauding as a great success, while the more sceptical are denouncing them as insufficient. The Dubai ‘set-up’ seemed more like a grammar class than anything else. It was all a question of verbs: eliminate, reduce or transition. We have ended up with the insufficient “transitioning towards societies that do not use fossil fuels.” Personally, as a complete sceptic, I will remember the words of Sultan Ahmed al Jaber: “an agreement is only as good as its implementation. We are what we do, not what we say.” Now we must see what we do.
