The chips are down: roasting summer means smaller fries

BRITONS will be eating shorter chips this year as potato farmers across Europe struggle to cope with the worst summer drought for decades.

The British population consumes 1.75 million tons of frozen chips every year and is, alongside the US, the world’s biggest importer of the product. Almost all imported frozen chips – about 750,000 tons – come from the Netherlands and Belgium.

The hot weather and lack of rain has diminished European crop yields, resulting in a production drop of about 20 per cent in Northern Europe.

The heat has also made the potatoes, usually the size of a small brick, smaller; this means shorter chips, potato experts in Britain and Belgium have warned.

The remaining million tons of frozen fries eaten every year are made from British potatoes but even these farmers are facing a 10 to 15 per cent drop in yield.

Britons are one of the biggest potato eaters in the EU, eating 220lb (100kg) of potatoes per person ever year.

“This was the hottest British summer since 1976, which any potato expert will tell you was an almost mythical year,” said Cedric Porter, the editor of World Potato Markets. “It is still talked about in potato circles.”

Mr Porter said that Belgian and Dutch farmers had been hit hard and could struggle to fulfil their contracts.

Potatoes sold on the open market, rather than under contract, were selling for £9-a-ton last year but were now selling for £222-a-ton.

The squeeze on frites has appalled Belgians, who cherish the chip as their national dish.

The traditional bintje and the newer fontane varieties have been much smaller, with crop yields dropping by 25 per cent in Belgium.

Pierre Lebrun is the coordinator of the potato sector of Wallonia, Belgium’s French-speaking region.

He told local media that the poor crop would mean frites being shortened by as much as 3 centimetres from their usual length of 8 to 9cm.

“We will all eat small fries,” said Mr Lebrun, who added that farmers in western Germany, France, the Netherlands and southern Britain “were all in the same boat”.

“The soils are very dry, it does not make it easy for farmers to work,” Mr Lebrun added.

“Belgium is one of the largest exporters of frozen fries in the world, shipping out 2.3 million tons of them every year.”

In the year ending June 2018, Belgium exported 344,000 tons of frozen frites to the UK, a 9.3 per cent increase compared with the previous year, despite Brexit.

The Belgian frite industry has been waging a campaign recently to boost its exports by using a James Bond-style character with a “licence to fry”.