UK aircraft and those from many other countries have been grounded since Thursday due to the ash cloud being formed from the eruption of the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull which is drifting across Europe.
The crisis could be over in days, but there is no certainty that this will be the case, and the disruption could spill over into weeks or months.
At the moment most of the media attention is on holiday makers who are stranded. But now stories have started to appear about the piles of rotting produce in Africa which cannot be imported while planes are grounded. As reported on the BBC News site:
One of the UK's biggest fresh fruit importers said business had ground to a halt because of the disruption.
Anthony Pile, chairman of Blue Skies, said the company was losing £100,00 a day as produce was rotting in Brazil and Africa.
"Losing a day is a disaster, losing three days is unbelievable and I don't know what we're going to do if we go into the middle of next week," he said.
Transporting food across the world is completely unsustainable and it is time we started to completely re-evaluate our dependence on food from outside the country and moved back to local food production.
May be a natural occurrence like this is just what we need to highlight the failings of our current system.
0 comments:
Post a Comment