Tomato shortage in the UK has politicians looking for answers
Fresh Tomato
Vegetables
United Kingdom
Published Mar 1, 2023
Tridge summary
Frost, floods, energy prices and Brexit are among the possible culprits in the shortage of tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli and lettuce in the U.K.
Original content
It's not easy to find a tomato in the U.K. right now. And if you do, you'd better savor it. Supermarkets like Tesco and Aldi have placed strict limits on the number of tomatoes customers can buy, as well as other produce, like cucumbers and broccoli. Economist Tim Harford, host of the podcast Cautionary Tales, serves tomatoes to his family a lot. So when he heard the news about shortages, he rushed to the local Tesco. "There's this whole shelf that normally has crates and crates of different kinds of tomatoes," he recalls. "And there were just three packs left." Limit per customer: one package. The last few years, this has been a familiar story. The pandemic created supply chain crises and shortages all across the global economy. Mostly those have been resolved, so what's going on with tomatoes? The main issue, says Harford, is a bad harvest out of Spain and Morocco, where Europe and the U.K. get a lot of their winter produce. A late frost and flooding killed a lot of the crops. ...
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