We had had a particularly hot winter, with consequent fruit harvests well in advance of the season (in Puglia at the end of January strawberries were found…), but now this beginning of spring marked by bad weather and above all by the return of winter, with harsh temperatures from North to South, is ruining everything. The damage to fruit and vegetable crops is heavy, and this is even more serious if we consider that in times of emergency from the coronavirus, the agri-food chain, as it was essential for ensuring food for Italians forced into the house, had been one of the few to keep up, indeed to grow. In fact, the consumption of fruit and vegetables, and fresh and made in Italy products in general, has exploded in recent weeks, given that Italians in quarantine have rediscovered the pleasure of cooking at home and eating healthy (also not being able to play sports for "burn").
As always, the problem was identified by Coldiretti, which highlighted a situation of patchy difficulty along the entire Peninsula, not only in the North, with the most serious damage recorded in Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Veneto and Puglia, due to the arrival of the disturbance from Eastern Europe. The wave of bad weather will continue for a couple of days and has already brought with it the return of snow at high altitudes. after a winter that ranked Italy's second warmest since the 1800s at a climatological level, registering a temperature even higher than 2,03 degrees compared to the reference average. Some peach, apricot and almond trees, for example, had even already borne their first fruits, while among the rows of pears, apples and kiwis there are ready gems that have been trapped by the ice and burned by the cold. Also in the fields serious damage can be counted for the first fruits of the season, from artichokes to asparagus, from beets to chicory up to peas.
But it's alarm also for 50 billion bees present in the area national, which have been deceived by the heat and have come out of the hives and now risk suffering heavy losses, giving up their precious work of pollination. This means no flowers and in fact that business also risks a lot: the horticultural sector employs 200 thousand people and in 2019 it exported plants and flowers for a value of almost 1 billion. We are facing the obvious consequences of climate change also in Italy where the exceptional nature of atmospheric events is now the norm, with a tendency to tropicalization which manifests itself with a higher frequency of violent demonstrations, seasonal mismatches, short and intense rainfall and the rapid transition from sunshine to bad weather, with significant temperature changes that compromise field crops with costs of over 14 billion euros in a decade, between losses of national agricultural production and damage to structures.
