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The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
EU's ‘chocolate crisis' worsened by climate breakdown, researchers warn
Climate breakdown and wildlife loss are deepening the EU's 'chocolate crisis', a report has argued, with cocoa one of six key commodities to come mostly from countries vulnerable to environmental threats. More than two-thirds of the cocoa, coffee, soy, rice, wheat and maize brought into the EU in 2023 came from countries that are not well-prepared for climate change, according to the UK consultants Foresight Transitions. For three of the commodities – cocoa, wheat and maize – two-thirds of imports came from countries whose biodiversity was deemed not to be intact, the analysis found. The researchers said the damage to food production by climate breakdown was made worse by a decline in biodiversity that has left farms less resilient. 'These aren't just abstract threats,' said the lead author of the report, Camilla Hyslop. 'They are already playing out in ways that negatively affect businesses and jobs, as well as the availability and price of food for consumers, and they are only getting worse.' The researchers mapped trade data from Eurostat on to two rankings of environmental security to assess the level of exposure for three staple foods and three critical inputs into the EU's food system. They used a ranking of climate readiness from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, which combines a country's vulnerability to climate damages with its access to financial and institutional support, and a ranking of biodiversity intactness from the UK Natural History Museum, which compares the current abundance of wild species to pre-modern levels. They found the majority of imports came from countries they ranked 'low-medium' on the climate scale and 'low-medium' or 'medium' on the biodiversity scale. Some food products were particularly exposed. The EU imported 90% of its maize from countries with low-medium climate readiness and 67% from countries with medium or lower biodiversity intactness, the report found. For cocoa, a key ingredient in the chocolate industry that Europe does not grow itself, the import exposure was 96.5% for climate preparedness and 77% on the biodiversity scale, the report found. The industry is already struggling with rises in the price of sugar, driven in part by extreme weather events, and supply shortages of cocoa. Most of its cocoa comes from west African countries facing overlapping climate and biodiversity risks. The report, which was commissioned by the European Climate Foundation, argued that large chocolate manufacturers should invest in climate adaptation and biodiversity protection in cocoa-growing countries. 'This is not an act of altruism or ESG [sustainable finance], but rather a vital derisking exercise for supply chains,' the authors wrote. 'Ensuring farmers are in their supply chains paid a fair price for their produce would allow them to invest in the resilience of their own farms.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Paul Behrens, an environmental researcher at the University of Oxford and author of a textbook on food and sustainability, who was not involved in the research, said the findings painted an 'extremely worrying picture' for food resilience. 'Policymakers like to think of the EU as food-secure because it produces quite a lot of its own food,' he said. 'But what this report shows is that the EU is vulnerable to climate and biodiversity risks in some vital food supply chains.' The report found coffee, rice and soy had fewer risks overall but noted hotspots of concern. Uganda, which provided 10% of the EU's coffee in 2023, had low climate preparedness and low-medium biodiversity intactness, the report found. Joseph Nkandu, founder of the National Union of Coffee Agribusinesses and Farm Enterprises in Uganda, called for more access to international climate finance to help farmers become more resilient in the face of worsening weather. 'The weather in Uganda is no longer predictable,' he said. 'Heatwaves, prolonged dry spells and erratic rains are withering our coffee bushes and damaging production.' Marco Springmann, a food researcher at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research, said a shift to healthier and more sustainable diets would be needed for food systems to withstand climate shocks. 'About a third of grains and basically all imported soy is used to feed animals,' he said. 'Aiming to make those supply chains more resilient therefore misses the point that this supports the very products that are to a large degree responsible for what is being tried to protect from.'
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Ahead of his time': Guyanese artist gets London show amid reappraisal
An artist whose work was part of the first wave of abstract art to hit the UK and presaged the climate breakdown protests as well as debates over the legacies of British colonialism is undergoing an 'overdue' reappraisal, according to experts and critics. Aubrey Williams, the Guyanese artist who moved to Britain in the 1950s, was a respected figure in his lifetime and the subject of several exhibitions in the UK. But after his death from cancer in 1990, the artist's influence and the legacy of his abstract painting has slowly faded from view in Britain. 'His work was very dramatic with the huge canvases, and the colour was intense always,' says Chili Hawes of October Gallery, the institution that represented Williams during his lifetime. 'There was nothing pale about his work. He loved the drama; he loved the colour.' Williams spent most of his time in the UK after arriving in 1952 and also had studios in Miami and Jamaica. He mingled with art's great and good, once meeting Picasso in Paris after being introduced by Albert Camus. 'He said that I had a very fine African head and he would like me to pose for him … he did not think of me as another artist,' was how Williams recalled the meeting. Despite Picasso's dismissal, Williams was a key player in the Caribbean Artists Movement (Cam), which emerged in the mid-1960s in Britain and was founded by West Indian artists, authors and playwrights. Cam had two main aims: forcing their work into the mainstream and debating what black art should be in the post-colonial 20th century. Alongside the likes of John La Rose, Althea McNish and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Williams took part in small meetings, dubbed 'warshis' by Williams, an Amerindian word he encountered in Guyana, which meant meetings where people 'unburdened' themselves. 'He was one of the ideas men in Cam,' says the academic Malachi McIntosh, who is currently writing A Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Britain, Black Power, and the Caribbean Artists Movement, a new history of Cam, for Faber. 'The big schism that broke Cam apart was between people who were saying art needs to be engaged in the community. Others, including Williams, said artists need to have complete freedom,' McIntosh added. As with his fellow Guyanese artist Frank Bowling who had his first major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2019, and McNish, who had her own major touring exhibition in 2022, Williams has undergone a resurgence in interest. In 2010, his work was included in a landmark Afro Modern show at Tate Liverpool; and between 2022 and 2024 there was a room dedicated to his work. At last year's Frieze Masters, Williams was given a coveted place in the 'Spotlight' section, with curators billing him as someone who had 'taken painting into new territories'. Earlier this year Yale University Press released a book that was co-edited by his daughter Maridowa Williams and included critical responses to his work, diary entries and poetry. 'There has been such a shift in the reception of those artists,' says Hawes. 'But Aubrey needs to be paid particular attention to, because he was ahead of his time. He talked about ecological matters … I think now is his time, in a sense.' October Gallery's artistic director, Elisabeth Lalouschek, points out that Williams's work would also take all sorts of turns, such as his interest in the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. 'When you look at the symphonies of Shostakovich he was trying to paint music in colour and in form, which is, of course, a very difficult task,' she says. A new exhibition of Williams's work is opening this week at October Gallery, which takes in several decades of his work and explains how he was hugely influenced by his time working as an agronomist in Guyana. He initially came to Britain to study agricultural engineering at Leicester University, and his interests in ecological matters and the ancient cultures of the Mayan, Aztec and Olmec cultures was a regular feature in his art. The author Anne Walmsley, wrote in her Guardian obituary of Williams, that his 'enquiring mind is continually focused on the relationship between man and nature, and the mythological mysteries echoed in artefacts of past civilisations'. Aubrey Williams: Elemental Force is on at October Gallery, 22 May to 26 July
