Editorial by Françoise Thuillier

The impact on the environment is not the only consequence of drought. It also has a financial cost, amounting to billions of Euros. Over the last twenty-five years, the accumulated cost would be eight billion euros and this could climb to twenty-one billion by 2040. We are staring in to a financial abyss with agriculture doomed to become the main victim. Apart from the direct losses, drought also leads to significant infrastructure costs being incurred by the farmers.

The impact on the environment is not the only consequence of drought. It also has a financial cost, amounting to billions of Euros. Over the last twenty-five years, the accumulated cost would be eight billion euros and this could climb to twenty-one billion by 2040. We are staring in to a financial abyss with agriculture doomed to become the main victim. Apart from the direct losses, drought also leads to significant infrastructure costs being incurred by the farmers.

There are a several different ways of irrigating but you can’t irrigate without water and even the smallest dams or reservoirs are subjected to severe restrictions. It’s enough to make the farmers despair, although new techni­ques and digital technology are finding their way onto the farms and country­side, with farmers using them more and more and drones are also beco­ming a common sight above the fields.

The use of these devices on arable farms is going to increase, not to mention the robots adapted to agri­culture to reduce the demanding nature of the work while lesse­ning the use of phytosanitary products. So, all is not gloom and doom for the farmers. Whereas our agriculture is certainly at risk, the remodelling of our current farming and food-producing model should solve the problem.