permaculture

[mIEKAL aND <dtv@mwt.net>]

(This sounds like a call for help from the permaculture  
network....Tho I really wonder if this has always been set up as a  
monoculture.)

A Spanish Town Withers With the Olive, Its Tree of Life

By RENWICK McLEAN
Published: November 3, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/international/europe/03spain.html

CAMBIL, Spain - The anxiety in this town begins to make sense after a  
short drive up the main road, as the homes and plazas give way to  
orchards with seemingly endless rows of olive trees.

Olive trees have been heavily pruned in Cambil, Spain, after a record- 
breaking freeze and a long drought. The trees are now largely barren.

Trees that normally sag with hundreds of pounds of fruit at this time  
of year are largely barren, holding little more than a handful of  
olives, many no bigger than peas. Some trees have dried up and  
shriveled, their brittle leaves breaking in the wind. Others have  
been cut to stumps to preserve their sap in hopes they will regenerate.

The groves that have sustained this region for centuries and helped  
turn it into the richest source of olive oil in the world have been  
decimated by circumstances that few here thought possible. A record- 
breaking freeze last winter was followed by a drought that has been  
described as the worst to hit Spain in 60 years.

The combination has been devastating to this town of 3,000 residents  
in the mountain ranges of Jaén, a southern province that is slightly  
larger than Connecticut and produced about 20 percent of the world's  
olive oil last year - almost as much as Italy's entire output.  
Whether oil producers elsewhere will make up for this year's drop in  
supply from Jaén is not yet clear, but the effects on towns like  
Cambil are likely to be profound.

Practically every family in Cambil owns olive trees, two or three  
hundred on average, residents say. The town, which has the slightly  
unkempt look of a community more focused on its orchards than itself,  
has a couple of groceries, a bar or two, a pharmacy and three olive  
oil factories.

But this year there is little fruit to feed the factories. "This is a  
catastrophe," said Juan Castro, 77, a retired farmer. "Without  
olives, we have nothing." He was speaking of Cambil, but he could  
have been speaking just as easily about dozens of similar towns in  
the mountains of Jaén.

The gravity of the problem extends far beyond this year's harvest.  
Since badly damaged groves can take 5 or even 10 years to regain full  
productivity, it may be a decade before the towns recover, if they  
ever do, agricultural experts say.

"This could be the end of a way of life," said Emilio Torres Velasco,  
an official at the Jaén branch of the Unión de Pequeños Agricultores  
y Ganaderos, or Small Farmers and Ranchers Union. "Some of these  
towns may be completely depopulated if they don't get help."

Life in the mountain orchards of Jaén is worlds away from the  
mechanized agriculture of the adjacent flatlands. Olives here are  
still largely collected by hand, with poles and baskets and  
occasionally mules the only practical way to reach the trees on the  
steepest slopes. The orchards are generally family-owned, and small -  
most are under 10 acres. The steep mountainsides have aggravated the  
effects of both the freeze and the drought, and farmers did not have  
the money or machinery to protect their trees or help them recover,  
the way their competitors can on the flat fields below. But in the  
past, the durability of the olive tree, which can bear fruit for  
hundreds of years, enabled residents here to scrape by.

Luis Miguel Martínez Martos, 40, a farmer in Jaén who advises the  
small-farmers union, said that olives are far more than a crop to the  
people who live here. "Their whole understanding of power and value  
is based on the olive tree," he said.

The oil is used here to deep fry eggs and to make potato chips, ice  
cream and even perfume. It is combined with lye to make laundry  
detergent, and applied to wounds to speed healing. The air here is  
cleaner, the food healthier and the life spans long, all because of  
the olive and its magical oil, residents say.

Residents have relied on the trees and fruit for centuries, sometimes  
in unexpected ways. The trees marked the borders between Muslim and  
Christian Spain in the Middle Ages. They provided refuge for  
residents fleeing aerial bombardments in the Spanish Civil War in the  
1930's, and food during the hungry decade that followed. "The olive  
tree is life for us," said Antonia García Espinosa, 73, who was born  
in Cambil and has never lived anywhere else. During the civil war,  
Mr. Martínez's great-grandfather took refuge from the bombs inside  
the concave trunk of one of the oldest trees in the family's orchard,  
he said, adding, "Many people in Jaén have stories like that."

The trees have thrived so well, so long, that residents have failed  
to consider other crops or industries, assuming that olives would  
always be reliable. Now few towns know how to attract new businesses.

"No industry will come here," said Mr. Torres, the official at the  
farmers union. "There is no infrastructure, no highways."

The only solution, Mr. Torres said, is for politicians in Madrid and  
Brussels to agree to offer more aid.

Juan José López, 27, a bartender in Cambil, said the town might get  
through the year with government loans and other aid. But in the time  
it takes the trees to recover, he said, "people are going to leave."

"There is nothing else here," he said.


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