In Iraq, most people eat tomatoes with a meal at least once a day, sometimes more. Which is why, when tomato prices go up, people really start complaining, says Kholoud Salman, an Iraqi journalist based in Baghdad.

"Tomato prices went from 750 Iraqi dinars [$0.56, €0.52] for a kilo to 2,000 or even 2,500 last summer," Salman told DW. "People start posting complaints about it on Facebook. Last year I read a post by a young guy, who said that tomatoes were so expensive, his mother was guarding their refrigerator!"

Prices for food like tomatoes regularly change at local markets depending on how the crop has been impacted by weather or drought, Salman notes.

Tomatoes are particularly impacted by heat waves because in Iraq, these are often grown and sold by smallholder farms, who don't have any way of processing or refrigerating the crop. So they need to sell the perishables straight away.

"Thanks to the years of war, Iraq hasn't modernized agricultural production and the marketing of its products," Iraqi economist Mohammad al-Fakhri told DW. "Much is still done in traditional ways and it wastes the time and efforts of the Iraqi farmer."

Iraq is not the only Middle Eastern country where climate change is impacting food prices in such an immediate way.

Last September, onion prices in Egypt tripled in price to 35 Egyptian pounds ($0.74, €0.68), compared to earlier in the year. Egyptian officials said onion traders had caused the problem and they temporarily stopped onion exports. But onion growers themselves said a heat wave had reduced the harvest........

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