French storms, Italian drought devastate European crops as wheat supply tightens

Over a single weekend in early June, violent weather swept across France with a force that left farms reeling. Hail the size of stones, winds that bent crops flat, and rain that fell in sheets tore through nearly sixty-five departments, the National Farmers' Union Federation reported on Monday. The damage was not scattered or partial. Some farms lost their entire crop—one hundred percent gone before harvest season even began. Wheat fields, apple orchards, vineyards that had taken years to mature: all of it caught in the same storm system that seemed to target agriculture with particular cruelty.

France is the world's fourth-largest wheat exporter. The timing could not have been worse. Harvest was approaching, and farmers were counting on yields they would never see. But France was not alone in its crisis. Across the border in Italy, a different catastrophe was unfolding in slow motion. No storms there—instead, a drought so severe that the country had received only half its normal rainfall for the entire year so far. The Po Valley, Italy's agricultural heartland, was hardest hit. Rice paddies that should have been flooded were cracking. Wheat and maize fields that needed water were withering.

The Italian agricultural lobby Coldiretti tallied the damage at close to one billion euros. Rice production alone was forecast to drop by ten thousand hectares. All cereals—wheat, maize, everything that feeds people and livestock—were facing significant yield reductions. The numbers were staggering, but they represented something simpler and more immediate: less food, higher prices, uncertainty about whether there would be enough.

What made this moment particularly fragile was the context in which it occurred. Global wheat supplies were already under strain. Russia's invasion of Ukraine had disrupted markets because both countries are major wheat producers. Prices had climbed. Now, just as the world was trying to adjust to that shock, Western Europe's own harvests were collapsing—some to violent weather, some to the slow suffocation of drought. The two crises were not separate events happening to bump into each other. They were converging on the same commodity, the same supply chain, the same global market.

French agriculture minister Marc Fesneau was scheduled to visit winegrowers in the Gironde and Gers regions on Monday to assess the damage firsthand. The visits would confirm what farmers already knew: that the storms had been severe, that recovery would take time, and that the coming months would test whether European agriculture could absorb this blow while the world watched wheat prices and wondered what would come next.