On Monday, supermarket chain Lidl GB followed market leader Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, and Aldi in imposing customer purchase limits on tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. This is not going to improve the situation in general, since the UK is faced with a shortage of fruit and vegetable supplies not only due to less production in Spain and the Netherlands as a result of the high energy costs, but also because of domestic production in Hertfordshire County and other places, as greenhouse capacities have been shut down for the same cost reasons.
This takes the UK into its fourth week of empty shelves in the supermarkets, with the Agriculture Ministry declaring that the situation is not expected to improve for several weeks more. Apart from the absence of food items at the stores, drastically increasing prices is a shock for average consumers. The inflation rate already was at 17 percent year-on-year at the end of February
