SAVING ITALY’S OLIVE TREES
IN EARLY 2016, Giovanni Melcarne, an agronomist and owner of an extra virgin olive-oil farm in Gagliano del Capo, walked through the countryside in southern Italy’s Puglia region. He was with a fellow olive-oil farmer who had called and told him there was something he had to see.
The two approached a centuriesold olive tree growing along a traditional stone wall. All around, the olive trees that covered the red clay were either dead or dying, filling the landscape with an unnatural greyness. Melcarne was not surprised: At least 2 million olive trees in Puglia looked this way, including many of his own.
SOME OLIVE TREES STANDING TODAY WERE ALIVE WHEN COLUMBUS VOYAGED TO AMERICA
The cause of the blight was , a bacteria that researchers believe arrived around 2010 from Latin America, possibly from Costa Rica on an ornamental plant. Today, Xylella has infected at least one-third of the 60 million olive trees in Puglia, which produces 12 per cent of the world’s olive oil. There is no chance of survival: once a plant is infected, it’s doomed to die within just a few years.
