GLOBAL warming is threatening the livelihoods of Britain’s fruit growers, and the future of the soft drinks industry that relies on them.

Winters are becoming progressively milder, but fruits such as apple, pear, strawberry, raspberry, blackcurrant and rhubarb need a sustained cold period to flower — and fruit — normally.

Unless growers can guarantee a substantial yield, many fruits will no longer be commercially viable, making a large dent in the country’s £230 million-a-year fruit industry. Alternatively, growers will have to move production further north to guarantee colder winters.

The threat is so serious that the Government is funding research on the likely impact and to identify the crops that are most likely to suffer. Early indications from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) suggest that a range of popular fruits could be lost.

Blackcurrant growers, based mainly in Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Somerset, Kent, Sussex and East Anglia, have already noticed that their crops, worth about £10 million a year, are suffering from lack of winter chill. The Meteorological Office has told them that they will not be able to grow the blackcurrant varieties in production now within 15 years. By 2050 they will need new varieties to survive the milder weather. It can take 15 to 20 years to develop new varieties.

The blackcurrant growers’ main customer is GlaxoSmithKline, which buys 95 per cent of the crop to produce Ribena, a brand worth £192 million a year. Ribena, first produced in 1936 as a vitamin C supplement drink, is manufactured at Coleford, Gloucestershire, and GlaxoSmithKline is anxious to retain its network of local growers.

A spokesman for the company said that it was so concerned about the threat to Britain’s blackcurrant growers — there are only about 50 — that it was collaborating with them to fund a three-year research project at Reading University. The concerns were the trigger for Defra to commission its own £60,000 research.

Emma Hennessey, head of horticulture crop sciences at Defra, said: “We just don’t know how serious the threat is. It could be there are certain geographical difficulties. But if the plants do not get sufficient chilling in the winter, you cannot get adequate flower development, and if you don’t get flowers you don’t get fruit. The cold triggers the period of plant dormancy which is required for buds to develop in the spring.”

She hopes that scientists will be able to identify the fruits at risk and also suggest how new varieties can be developed that do not require sustained periods of winter chill — between 0C-7C (32F-45F).

Edward Thompson, who runs Pixley Berries, in Ledbury, Herefordshire, has noticed a trend in some of his bushes whereby buds are refusing to break out in the spring. He said: “These buds are just not waking up in the spring and that is because we have lost winter chill.”

He said that a typical blackcurrant bush in Britain needs 1,800 to 2,000 hours of chill in the winter months up to the end of February.

Mr Thompson, who has been growing blackcurrants for 30 years, said: “The anxiety for me as a grower is that the scientific community has some catching up to do. It takes 15 or 20 years to breed a variety. It may be there are some varieties in the pipeline already that have the properties we need. I hope we do because in the present economic conditions I would not know what I would change production to.”

The total value of soft fruit in the UK in 2001, the last year for which figures are available, was £133 million, and orchard fruit was £97 million. The main sectors are strawberries, worth £80 million, dessert apples, £36 million, raspberries, £31 million, cooking apples, £23 million, pears, £10 million, and blackcurrants, £10 million.

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