Pack up the BBQ, rain is on the way!

IF YOU were hoping the glorious weather over the weekend was a sign of things to come, there’s bad news in store.

The blue skies and scorching temperatures – which matched those in Barcelona and parts of the Canary Islands – will be replaced by downpours and cooler weather this week as the miniheatwave comes to an end.

Showers and thunderstorms are set to sweep in from today, with the South West, western Scotland and Northern Ireland seeing heavy rain this morning.

Met Office forecaster Daniel Panton-King said: ‘Through Monday, the rain will spread eastwards across most places.

‘It’ll be showery rain, and it will brighten up as the day goes on for most of England and Wales, so there will be some sunshine later in the day.’

The Met Office said southern areas could see some humid, thundery weather developing across

‘Will spread across most places’

the rest of the week, while it will be cloudy and wet in the North West.

After a roaring start to July – with the hottest ever July 1 seeing temperatures reach 36.7C (98.1F) at Heathrow – much of the rest of the month was a damp squib.

But the dazzling skies and warmth returned over the weekend, with a top temperature of 27.8C (82F) recorded in Charlwood, near Gatwick, on Saturday, and 27C (81F) in Gravesend, Kent, yesterday.

Bookmakers slashed their odds on August being the hottest on record. Coral cut its odds to 6-4 and the firm saw a flurry of money being bet on this month beating previous highs. But forecasters say temperatures for the rest of this week will be average for the time of year.

Today it is expected the mercury will linger around 23C (73F) in the North, while the South will see highs of 25C (77F). On Tuesday and Wednesday, temperatures are predicted to peak at 21C (70F) in the North and 23C (73F) in the South. Troubling secret behind your BBQ

charcoal –

THere can surely be few more popular summer perennials than the traditional British barbecue. The uK is now the BBQ capital of europe — the setting for about 120 million outdoor cooking sessions a year, with the market in alfresco grilling now worth around £2 billion (up from £150 million in 1997). But behind the mouth-watering sausages and burgers you enjoyed at the weekend lies a rather more unpalatable story. For much of the charcoal being used to fire up grills in gardens around the country is produced in Namibia, where it is known as ‘black gold’. And, say campaigners, much has been produced using slave labour on the other side of the world.

In fact, if you buy a bag of charcoal in Britain, there are very good odds that it has been packed into containers in the Namibian port of Walvis Bay, and shipped more than 5,000 miles to Felixstowe, our largest container port.

Namibia is the world’s sixth-biggest exporter of charcoal, and the uK is the largest single importer of the fuel from this South-West African country.

Why is charcoal nicknamed ‘ black gold’ in Namibia? Because it produces vast profits for local farmers. And one of the reasons for this is that the indigenous charcoal trade is produced by sweatshop or slave labour.

A leading environmental charity, Fern, has now revealed the high price that Namibian charcoal workers pay for the cheap British barbecue. The title of its report leaves little to the imagination — Playing With Fire: Human misery, environmental Destruction and Summer BBQs.

The Fern investigation found Namibian labourers were typically paid a pittance and live in vast shanty towns made from black plastic sheeting, without access to toilets or running water.

Charcoal is produced by slowly heating wood with an absence of oxygen, allowing the chemical conversion of wood into charcoal.

The work involved is punishing: chopping trees from dawn to dusk, cutting it into small pieces to burn, then removing the charcoal from the kiln.

The workers’ living conditions are miserable.

‘Although it is tough, we have no choice — there is no alternative,’ said one Namibian worker quoted in the Fern study.

The majority come from the Kavango, Namibia’s poorest region. They are mostly employed as contractors, without the benefit of housing or social security, and are paid 700 Namibian dollars (about £35) per ton of charcoal they produce — which is typically half the price the farmer then sells it on for.

And since most of the farms are in remote areas, with little access to shops, let alone health facilities, workers have to buy their provisions on credit — sometimes at considerably higher prices — from the farmers’ stores, leaving them with precious little money at the end of the month.

most charcoal workers do not have any protective clothing, such as safety boots, gloves and masks, to protect them from smoke inhalation, sawdust, heat stroke, cuts and snakebites.

The health hazards associated with small-scale charcoal production have been well documented, including ‘increased respiratory symptoms and decreased pulmonary function’. Put simply: the conditions in which Namibian charcoal is produced are a world away from the relaxed, happy barbecues that we use it for.

Yet the uK imports more of Namibia’s charcoal than any other country — largely because of its low price compared with our domestic product. The wholesale price of charcoal produced in the uK is about £1,400 per ton, compared with just £76 a ton for Namibia’s. ‘ Consumers are oblivious to the conditions it is produced under, with many workers living in atrocious conditions we’re more used to seeing on our TV screens beamed from makeshift refugee camps in a disaster zone,’ said Fern campaign co- ordinator Saskia Ozinga. Supermarkets and other major retailers usually only sell charcoal that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which demands environmental and social inspections.

But many consumers in Britain buy barbecue fuel from petrol station forecourts and small independent shops, where the charcoal stocked is often not FSC certified.

‘Whatever guarantees FSC does give, it’s undermined by the large amount of non-FSC charcoal entering the uK,’ says ms Ozinga. ‘ retailers should be made aware of the human and environmental costs of what they are selling.’

The Namibian government is also concerned about the conditions in which charcoal is produced.

But campaigners claim overhauling the industry is a huge task. Far easier, they say, would be changing the law so importing illegally- sourced charcoal from Namibia is a criminal offence.

meanwhile, the charcoal fuelling your BBQ may be causing misery to slave workers in West Africa.