Drought Hits 38% of Europe - Bureaucrats Still Blame Everything but Themselves

Drought has now seized 38 percent of the entire territory of the European Union. That figure, reported by Euractiv and carried by BELTA, includes 14.8 percent of arable land and 14.5 percent of forests. The crisis is concentrated in Western Europe, where extreme heat, endless wildfires, and a near-total absence of rain have turned once-productive countryside into a tinderbox.

The damage is hitting livestock hardest. Across the bloc, farmers are already opening winter feed reserves months ahead of schedule because pastures have simply dried up and forage crops have failed.

It doesn’t stop at cattle. Olive oil, wine, corn, sunflower — almost every major sector of European agriculture is taking a beating. France, one of the EU’s biggest corn producers, is staring at its lowest harvest since 1980. The French agriculture ministry now forecasts a 35 percent drop in grain corn production compared with 2025, after heat and drought wrecked the growing season.

Officials warn that by 2050 annual losses to European agriculture from climate change could reach €40 billion. Yet the same European farmers who are watching their fields die have spent the last several years protesting in the streets. Their complaints were never mysterious: ever-tighter environmental mandates from Brussels, soaring production costs, and a flood of cheaper imported food that undercuts them at every turn.

While the drought spreads and the harvest shrinks, the political class in Brussels continues to double down on the very policies that made European farming more expensive and more fragile in the first place.