The end of food as we know it?

These photographs show where our food comes from. Some of it at least; the perfectly formed year-round tomatoes, cucumbers and other fruit and veg we take for granted in our supermarkets. If you haven't seen the pictures before (courtesy of Google Earth) it's a pretty amazing site - and sight.

Click on the first and you will see an area west of Almeria on the south coast of Spain - about the size of the Isle of Wight - much of which is covered with fields. And in the close-up you'll see that those fields are in turn covered almost entirely with plastic polytunnels - 100 square miles of them.

On the face of it, this is an enterprising use of part of one of Europe's driest areas. Desert basically. But underneath the plastic sheeting and out on the motorways of Spain trouble is brewing.

Concerns were raised years ago by environmentalists that the water used to grow the crops [tomatoes and cucumbers take a lot of water] was in limited supply. It was being drawn from deep bore holes, some of them illegal, and this same water was being used to supply the area's new golf course and sprawling urban developments that were springing up as they had done in other parts of Spain for decades. It doesn't rain in this part of Spain.

Luckily there was a plan, and today a series of desalination plants convert sea water into fresh water suitable for drinking and watering. It's an expensive solution but nonetheless brilliant. Or would have been were that the end of it.

By last year there were 10 golf courses in the region with 25 more being planned and the populaton was expanding, all adding to the strain on the water supply. The fruit and veg producers had seen the cost of watering their crops rise by more than three times from 24cents a cubic metre from the bore holes to 90cents from the new factories. It was simply too expensive and to compensate the farmers began to mix the new water with the old, putting further strain on the limited underground supply.

Separately, salt is reportedly contaminating the natural water supply but even if we ignore that and we ignore other environmental issues about pesticides and ignore claims that up to 80,000 illegal workers are employed to pick the stuff, it still all adds up to one thing: the price of our fruit and veg is going to rise. But that's not the end of it.

For the last three days the Spanish drivers of the lorries that thunder across the continent transporting all this produce are on strike over the rising price of, not water, but oil. And it's spreading. Supermarkets in Spain are reporting empty shelves, planes are being grounded because there is no fuel. Gibralter has run dry. Latest predictions about the price of fuel are potentially ruinous.

However these crises pan out and if this region can remain viable as Europe's greenhouse, we will be paying a lot more for our food - and that's if they're able to get it out of the country in the first place.

That's why I welcome the news today that the biggest greenhouse in Britain is under construction. It's a mere 91 hectares, compared to Almeria's 40,000, but it's a start and is likely to be the first step towards reducing our dependence on oil, on foreign politics and on foreign weather. At least weather is something we have here in plentiful supply.

Richard Browning, This is Money

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