Olive trees in Spain and neighboring countries have little fruit, which itself could wither away
As summer winds down in the verdant olive groves across southern Spain’s region of Andalusia, the tree branches typically bend down, heavy with ripening fruits. But this summer, Cristóbal Cano’s groves—25 acres in the city of Alcalá la Real near Granada, Spain—look light and nearly empty, as if the trees have already been harvested.
“It is a catastrophe,” Cano says. “Usually after a bad harvest came a good harvest, and after a good one, a bad one [came]. Something like this had never happened in our industry.” Andalusia’s drought and heat waves are among several climate stressors to hit farmers across the Mediterranean this summer. Elsewhere in Spain, extreme weather events devastated melon, watermelon and citrus crops. In Sicily, olive oil producers say unseasonal rainfall and cold weather will halve their output. “Sicily normally produces 50,000 [metric] tons of olive oil per year,” says Mario Terrasi of the Oleum Sicilia cooperative. “This year, if we reach 30,000, I think we’ll pop a good bottle.
In Andalusia, the olive farmers’ plight follows a two-year drought combined with record-breaking heat waves. It wasn’t the intensity of the drought as much as its duration that posed problems for olive trees, because water scarcity has more of an effect than high heat. “There have been many dry years in Spain,” says Luca Testi, a researcher at the Institute of Sustainable Agriculture at the Spanish National Research Council.
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