Emergency measures, awareness campaigns, price increases and, above all, great concern for the future in the medium and long term. A journey from north to south through the territory of continental Portugal shows a country in a trickle, with local authorities striving to guarantee basic supply needs at a time when one of the worst drought situations in memory is being experienced.
“We are going through particularly difficult times,” admitted the Minister of Agriculture, Maria do Céu Antunes, at the end of August during a press conference at the end of a new meeting of the permanent government commission that is monitoring the effects of the drought in Portugal. According to the minister, Portugal is under the effects of one of the “most severe periods of drought in the last century”, specifically, the second most serious episode since 1931, when records began.
At the origin of this exceptional situation is a particularly hot summer (in all the meteorological history recorded in Portugal, only 2016 recorded higher temperatures), associated with the profound lack of rain that marked the winter and that already at the beginning of the year was predictable A very difficult year for Portuguese farmers, as the Observer showed in a report with several growers in the northern region of the country.
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Source: Observadora
