Farmers call for Truss and Sunak to tackle ‘immoral’ water wastage

theguardian.com:

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak must set out emergency water plans to tackle “immoral” wastage, the president of the National Farmers’ Union has said.

Farmers fear their crops will be harmed, or even fail, due to the recent dry weather. If there is not significant rainfall this autumn and winter, drained reservoirs and empty rivers will not refill sufficiently for a lot of farming to be viable next year. And next year’s potential drought could be more severe than this summer’s arid conditions.

Minette Batters, the NFU president, told the Guardian that neither leadership candidate had set out a water security plan, and that she believed the problem was being neglected by politicians.

“I am calling on the two candidates to commit to food security, and water has to be one of the first places that we start as we will never have a resilient food system if we don’t have resilient water infrastructure,” she said.

“It’s immoral and unethical to think we can continue to go on allowing our water to be wasted. I want to hear from both of them how they plan to fix the huge problems we are currently facing when it comes to water.”

To her surprise, despite the drought dominating conversations across Britain, “they haven’t mentioned water. We have been calling for a long time now for water to have a totally fresh approach, it’s outrageous that we have no ability to move water, or to pay farmers for storing water.”

Farmers have been contacting Batters, who runs an arable and beef farm in Wiltshire, to say they are scared about how little water their crops have received.

“Our members are very concerned at the moment, the situation with potatoes is really serious, they are a very water-hungry crop, they need access to water. Right now we just don’t