Europe’s latest summer heat wave risks worsening already-fragile global food security.
Though hunger worldwide has fallen in recent years, restrictions to trade through key global chokepoints as well as fears of an unusually intense El Niño threaten that progress.
In Europe, higher-than-usual temperatures and a lack of rain have left land parched and unsuitable for growing, risking poor harvests and forcing some farmers to delay autumn planting, while falling water levels in the Danube River are limiting the amount of cargo that vessels can carry along an important corridor for ferrying food: “The economic situation in agriculture is brutally tense,” a farmers’ association official told Die Zeit.