Drone captures devastation of Italian drought

STORY: Several Italian regions have already declared a state of emergency, looking to free up funds to counter the growing water crisis, while farming associations say the agricultural output is set to plunge this year in key growing areas.

Water levels in rivers and lakes have sunk to levels never before seen this early in the summer including the River Po, which has shrunk to a tiny stream in some places.

The Po, Italy's longest river, which crosses the major northern regions and accounts for around a third of the country’s agricultural production, is experiencing its worst drought in 70 years.

"Right now, according to the average of the last 20 years or so, the metric level of the Po should be a meter and a half higher", Supervisor of Ferrara Plain Land Reclamation Consortium, Nicola Forlani, told Reuters while standing on a sandbank that emerged from what is normally the bed of the Po River in Occhiobello, a small town that the river runs through in the northern region of Veneto.

He said the water levels were dropping by a few centimetres every day.

Unusually low water levels have also affected the production of corn and wheat and local farmers are forced to pump water from the river with the help of water pumps to minimise the damage, but many crops are now inevitably lost.

Drone video captured the extent of dried-up crops in a corn field in the countryside near Ferrara, a city not far from Occhiobello in the region of Emilia Romagna.

"This drought is real, it is not a hypothesis that needs to be explained, it's visible to everyone", local farmer Andrea Bandiera said as he walked through the field.

"The wheat suffered from the drought in the spring, and their grains did not spike so the current production is half of what it should be. We can't make a living if production is that low."

The ANBI irrigation body said the major northern lakes were already below, or close to record lows, with the level of natural reservoirs in central Italy also plunging. The Tiber river is at multi-year lows while the flow rate of the Aniene river has halved.