WEDNESDAY,NOVEMBER6,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAILO NEWS | A
O
n a warm Saturday morn-
ing in late October, the sil-
ver-green leaves of the 200
productive olive trees on a rolling
country property in Umbria, in
central Italy, sparkled in the bril-
liant sun. Fausto Venturi, a local
farmer who devotes autumn
weekends to making olive oil,
could not have been happier.
The weather was perfect for
harvesting the Moraiolo olives.
The small, round green fruit is in-
digenous to Umbria and Tuscany,
prized by olive growers for its
high yield and among connois-
seurs for the oil’s gorgeous emer-
ald-green colour and fruity aro-
ma, with hints of artichokes and
herbs. Better yet, the trees were in
near full bloom, signalling a rare
bumper crop. Climate change,
bug infestations and disease, no-
tably the horrificXylella fastidiosa
bacterium that is killing millions
of olive trees in southern Italy,
has made life somewhere be-
tween difficult and miserable –
depending on the region – for
Italy’s crucial olive-oil industry in
recent years.
The European Commission’s
website calls Cylella “one of the
most dangerous plant bacteria
worldwide, causing a variety of
diseases, with huge economic im-
pact for agriculture, public gar-
dens and the environment.” It
can also attack stone fruits such
as cherries, almonds and plums.
The bacterium is terrorizing ol-
ive-orchard owners in Puglia, in
the heel of the Italian boot. Puglia
and Calabria – the toe – account
for more than two-thirds of Ital-
ian olive-oil production (Umbria
provides only 2 per cent). If those
two regions were to get wiped
out, the enormous industry –
supplied by about 250 million
trees on 700,000 olive farms cov-
ering 1.1 million hectares – would
be moribund. That scenario is not
out of the question. The bacteri-
um arrived in southern Puglia,
near the baroque city of Lecce, in
- The source is thought to be
an infected ornamental coffee
plant imported from Costa Rica.
It has acted as a wrecking ma-
chine, infecting about 21 million
trees, according to Coldiretti,
Italy’s agriculture association.
Industry estimates put Italian
olive-oil production in the disas-
trous 2016-17 harvest at only
200,000 tonnes, down by more
than half from the previous year,
owing to a particularly nasty
combination of extreme weather
events, a fruit-fly attack and Cy-
lella. Olive-orchard owners such
as Mr. Venturi say “normal” har-
vest years are becoming rarer.
The disease is carried by a tiny
insect known by various names,
including the spittlebug. The bac-
teria spread by the bugs latches
onto xylem tubes, the trees’ wa-
ter-and-nutrient-transportation
system, producing what the Unit-
ed Nation’s Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) calls an “in-
ternal drought.” The weakened
branches, leaves and fruit die,
then the whole tree withers away,
producing eerie ghost orchards.
The infected trees are difficult to
quarantine quicklyÝ the long in-
cubation period means visible
symptoms often don’t arise until
seven months to a year after the
infection sets in. “There is no cure
for it,” said Shoki Al-Dobai, FAO’s
transboundary plant pests and
diseases team leader in Rome.
“It’s possible that it could keep
spreading north. That would be a
disaster.”
Infected trees and those
around them have to be de-
stroyed, sometimes in the pres-
ence of weeping farmers. Many of
the olive trees in Puglia are hun-
dreds of years old, and at least
one is 3,000 – it was ancient be-
fore Jesus was born. There are sto-
ries of farmers chaining them-
selves to their cherished trees to
try to spare them from the chain-
saw. But the Puglia tree cull,
which was way too slow at first,
continues and is being monitored
closely by agriculture officials at
the European Commission.
Arrigo Peri, an orthodontist in
Rome, lives in fear because his
family owns an organic 1,000-tree
orchard near the coastal city of
Bari, about 80 kilometres north-
west of Puglia’s infected zones.
He’s had a string of bad harvests
owing to extreme weather, in-
cluding drought and frost (which
cut his normal yield by 80 per
cent last year) and severe olive-
fly infestations that may be the
result of climate change. And
now the threat of Cylella. “My last
good yield was three years ago,”
he said. “Des, we are getting wor-
ried about Cylella. It’s the last
thing we need.”
The disease hasn’t hit Umbria
yet, but a subspecies has beenspotted right next door in Tusca-
ny and a few other parts of South-
ern Europe, including Corsica
and Spain’s Balearic Islands. Mr.
Venturi and other olive-oil mak-
ers are terrified that Cylella will
plow through his region at some
point. “We are praying it doesn’t
arrive, but it could,” he said.
In a recent report, Martin Go-
defroid of the French National In-
stitute for Agriculture Research,
said that generally warmer tem-
peratures are making life easier
for Cylella, which is a tropical dis-
ease. He said that “climate
change may strongly impact [the
bacterium’s] distribution.”
Consumers in Italy and other
countries who cherish healthy
and flavoursome extra-virgin ol-
ive oil – which is made by press-
ing the olives, rather than using
heat or chemicals to help extract
the oil – are paying the price. Re-tail prices are rising as weather-
related shortages develop, and
the quality among cheaper
brands is falling as blends of for-
eign or low-quality bulk oils
make it onto supermarket
shelves. “The oil you now buy in
supermarkets won’t be 100-per-
cent Italian,” Mr. Venturi said. “It
might be mixed with Tunisian
and Moroccan oils.”
Italy is Europe’s second-largest
olive-oil producer, after Spain,
and accounts for a quarter of the
continent’s olive harvest. The in-
dustry is worth billions of euros a
year. In most of the world, fam-
ilies make do with cheap, mass-
produced oils made from palm,
canola, corn and other vegetable
plants for their intake of fats. But
in the Mediterranean countries,
where the vast majority of the
world’s olives are grown, meals
devoid of virgin olive oil are vir-tually unthinkable.
Mr. Venturi, 49, said an entirely
unexpected deep freeze last
spring in Umbria sent yields tum-
bling. The trees on this particular
property, located about a 20-min-
ute drive from Spoleto, a medie-
val gem of a city and UNESCO
heritage site, produced only
about 85 litres of oil in the fallÝ
this year, he expects 320. The oil
will sell for about 12 ($17.50) a
litre in the local market (he kicks
back about 10 per cent, in the
form of oil, to the owners of the
property).
After he and his colleague cov-
ered the ground with enormous
fine-mesh nets, used to catch the
harvested olives, they fired up a
small diesel generator to power
an air compressor, which in turn
powered the thrashing mechani-
cal rakes that shake the branches
and comb off the olives. “Watch
out for vipers here,” he warned.
“They’re poisonous.”
The biggest, healthiest trees let
drop 15 kilograms to 20 kilograms
of olives. After a couple of hours
of exhausting work, they filled
two large containers. Harvesting
all of the property’s trees would
take two men three or four days,
from dawn to dusk.
The olives were transported by
tractor to the localfrantoio(olive
press), in this case a private busi-
ness called Frantoio Filippi that
presses olives from its own 1,000-
tree farm and those from nearby
farms.
Two years ago, the Filippi fam-
ily installed a new pressing sys-
tem, an array of tubes, belts,
crushers, mixers, centrifuges and
filters that transforms raw olives
into oil within two hours. The ol-
ives, many with leaves still at-
tached, are dumped into a hop-
per. Leaf removal and olive wash-
ing are the next stages, followed
by the grinding of the olives by
both disks and hammers. The re-
sult is a thick slurry that looks
like green pasta sauce and is, in
fact, called an olivepasta.It’s
pumped into a centrifuge that
separates the water from the oil.
After passing through filters,
the final product is a dazzling, al-
most fluorescent, emerald oil
that emerged from the spigot car-
rying the faint smell of apples.
“Every terrain produces olives
with a different smell, depending
on the soil, light and other condi-
tions,” said Federico Caporali, 43,
co-owner of Frantoio Filippi.
He said this season was much
better than some of the previous
years, when extreme temper-
atures and too much rain sent
production plummeting. “But we
hope Cylella doesn’t come here,”
he said.Anolivegroveiscoveredwithenormousfine-meshnetsspreadoutunderthetreestocatchtheolivesforharvesting.PHOTOS BY FABRIZIO TROCCOLI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Italy’solive-oilindustryfacesexistentialthreats
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ERICREGULY
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OLIVEQUICKDECLINESYNDROMEJOHNSOPINSKI/THE GLOBEANDMAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN;OPENSTREETMAP
CONTRIBUTORS;HIU;UNFOODANDAGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION0 222220
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