10 ms·

Olive tree disease across Europe 'could costs billions'

148 points by leonagano 7y ago

glofish 7y ago
billions in losses used to sound like a big number, ah the good old days
hanniabu 7y ago
Get used to it, this will become much more common with climate change. Insect and diseases infestation and ecosystem collapse will be a weekly thing before you know it.
- blix 7y ago
  I'm not sure climate change bears more blame than agricultural systems that incentivize monocultures fragile in the face of external stresses. Climate change is only one such stress. Crop diseases are as old as agriculture. And really, agricultural collapse is quite separate from ecosystem collapse; agriculture is many ways defined by the intentional absence of ecosystem.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    Just going by the wikipedia entry for X. fastidiosa, but "Symptoms of X. fastidiosa diseases worsen during hot, dry periods in the summer: lack of water and maximum demand from a full canopy of leaves combined with symptoms due to disease stress infected plants to a breaking point. Cold winters can limit the spread of the disease;[8] as occurs in California, but not in regions with milder winters such as Brazil." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylella_fastidiosa#Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylella_fastidiosa#Environment) It sounds like this could definitely be related to climate change. I'm sure monoculture agriculture doesn't help, but (based on quick searching) olive trees don't fruit in a commercially viable way until they are 7+ years old and don't reach peak yield until they are 70 years old. If it was purely a monoculture issue, I'd question why it didn't happen sooner given the lead time necessary to increase production.
    - briandear 7y ago
      Yet in 1956 a devastating freeze destroyed the French olive oil industry. So perhaps an argument could be made that if there was more global warming in 1956, the industry would be more robust. We can play the “climate change causes everything bad” game for pretty much anything, but we’d be intellectually dishonest if we denied that climate change could actually have benefits.
      - jchw 7y ago
        This logic feels somewhere along the lines of death as a cure for cancer.
    - blix 7y ago
      I don't think it's necesarily one or the other. Climate change is a stressor, and monoculture makes crops less reseilient to stress. Crops undergo massive failures relatively frequently. Bananas are headed towards their second extinction this half-century. As stresses perhaps become more acute due to a rapidly changing climate and environment, this lack of resliliency may prove quite harmful, more so than the damage that can be reliably attributed to any individual stressor.
      - throwaway5752 7y ago
        I don't know, I actually don't know enough about olive farming practices to know if monoculture is a factor? I assume this is a factor and you are correct. I did find a Nature article about it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y that was pretty useful. Seems to suggest it was a factor and may expand the effected range, but it is also an introduced disease and doesn't require climate change to impact large parts of the Mediterranean coast. edit: You may be interested to know bananas didn't go extinct, per se. Mass market US bananas are propagated clones. We have bred the seeds out of bananas (with rare exceptions), so most large scale agricultural plants are tissue culture or cutting clones. The mass market variety was the Gros Michel/Big Mike, which you can still buy online easily. Panama Rust is adapting to the Cavendish, which was resistant when it became the new US mass market variety after the Cavendish. Greater availability of other varieties would be great. Neither of those are the best bananas out there (Nam Wah, Pisang Raja, and Blue Java are all great).
- jeffreyrogers 7y ago
  I think it has much more to do with monocropping than with climate change. There are lots of other examples with different crops long before the effects of climate change were noticeable.
  - vondur 7y ago
    Yeah, this seems to be similar to what is happening to the banana.
  - divinebovine 7y ago
    It has more to do with invasive species than anything. Xyella fastidiosa is native to the gulf coast states in the US. Olives and other species from the old world lack any resistance to the bacteria. This same bacteria causes Pierce's disease in Vitis vinifera, the common grape (from Eurasia). Whereas North American Vitis species are resistant to Xf. There's a lot of research going into solving Pierce's disease here in the US from breading programs to bacteriophages. The later may end up helping solve the same problem in Olives.
- tathougies 7y ago
  Oh right. Never happened before. Disease is a new thing folks /s
- dantheman 7y ago
  What does this have to do with climate change?
  - briandear 7y ago
    Nothing, but people like to trot out climate change fears at every opportunity. It’s getting to be almost like religious people that want to proselytize at every opportunity.
- sdffdsfdsfsddsf 7y ago
  Yeah, only germs and fungi grow in warm regions. All higher life forms will rot away. Thankfully, our brains will rot away first.
bsder 7y ago
Maximally efficient is minimally robust.
- pacamara619 7y ago
  This is so obviously false. Counterexample: Robusta Coffee.
  - mrpopo 7y ago
    Why do you say it is obvious? Monocultures were selected at a specific point in time for their properties, which may include robustness, but it doesn't change the fact that they are basically giant colonies of clones. Real long-term robustness in nature comes from genetic diversity, which ensures future pathogens with a particular affinity will not be able to thrive through entire countries/continents.
    - CMCDragonkai 7y ago
      That also applies to people right?
      - Danieru 7y ago
        Do you have some cloning technology we are not aware of? A mono-culture of genetically identical human clones is sci-fi.
ggm 7y ago
Australia has an olive industry. Its small, far smaller than the scale of this problem, but we do, and we make some really good robust EVO. I don't wish this disease on the countries exposed to it, but I do hope we can negotiate better prices for our olive oil and related products selling into Europe and the world. We're also (at least in principle, but there are holes) builders of strong biosecurity boundaries. I'd hope we can avoid this disease for a while until mitigation is worked out. We didn't escape the banana diseases. That was bad :-(
- emmelaich 7y ago
  Sort of related; Australia has the oldest grape vines. France's (and California's?) were wiped out by a pest. https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/how-drink-wine-worlds-oldest-vines https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/how-drink-wine-worlds-...
  - contingencies 7y ago
    Yunnan in China also protected grapes over that period which were planted by French Jesuit missionaries in the 19th century.[0][1] "Somewhere in South America" was mentioned elsewhere in this thread: I suspect there are more locations. Basically, without actually reading any sources, my impression is that the event was severe but its totality was overstated. [0] https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/3943/new-gods-for-frontier-people-missionaries-in-northwest-yunnan https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/3943/new-gods-for-fro... [1] https://supchina.com/2019/07/23/grapes-of-god-smitten-the-transformation-of-cizhong-yunnan/ https://supchina.com/2019/07/23/grapes-of-god-smitten-the-tr...
supernova87a 7y ago
See what happens when trees don't obey social distancing rules!
harikb 7y ago
People will close the article as soon as they read “50 years”. Sometimes science needs to lie a little bit for a cause
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  And that’s how you burn all trust, like with the WHO lying about masks, human to human transmission of COVID and the effectiveness of border controls. If they’ll lie for the cause and you know it why trust that third is not one of those times?
  - harikb 7y ago
    I understand what you are saying. I wish there was a aolution though. Nobody care about anything 5+ years down the road. Everyone magically assumes some magic invention will undo years of ignoring science. Anyways, in this particular case, it is probably not preventable, but I wish we could quantify the effect closer to a year or two.
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      Current politicians don't care about anything 5+ years in the future. The youth very well does, see e.g. Fridays for future movement. We need a maximum age for politicians, and mandate ethnic, gender and age diversity in politics. Additionally we have to incentivize long-term thinking and disincentivize short term optimization. As long as we are in capitalism, an idea would be a 2 million dollar bonus to be paid out 20 years after a politician retires - which is only valid if the decisions this politician took during their time in office had a quantifiably positive impact for general society.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        > We need a maximum age for politicians, and mandate ethnic, gender and age diversity in politics. This is a terrible idea. If you can’t vote the power structure will just abuse you without thinking. See the total lack of freedom and respect for children, non-citizens, whether visitors or residents, permanent or temporary, and for felons deprived of a vote. Relying on people being good because it’s nice works much worse than relying on them not harming you because it will have consequences. If you want a representative pool of politicians mandating “diversity” is the wrong way to do it. Use sortition. Draft legislators in much the same way jurors are compelled to serve. I would not want to have this be the only way legislators are chosen because a legislature with an average IQ of 100 where most people had not graduated college does not seem likely to be full of the highly competent. I’d support one chamber chosen this way and another elected though. Competence isn’t the only valuable thing.
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
there is some truth to this. same news was posted here on HN last year. but in reality, there is more to it. yes, there is a pathogen. but EU olive industry is moving to turkey and morocco. why? simple. cheap labour. olive trees can live for a very very long time, but there are two kinds of olives harvested. for oil and then for table olives. the former has been mechanised and the latter is not. so it's expensive. it's cheaper to raze down old olive orchards and just plant new ones. the new ones can be trellised and have dwarf hybrids or disease resistant varieties. also cheaper labour if not grown in the EU. i suspect they'd use that ag land for something else. likely development. the same thing happened in central california. one of the major buyers for table olives from EU stopped orders from california. and entire orchards..thousands and thousands of acres were razed down. they simply moved their business to morocco and turkey. (inside source. cant confirm or verify, but i trust this source.) western countries have this plan to outsource ag to developing nations because of labour. it is the most dumbass strategy ever. it is not going to be like IT has been outsourced. it relies on long supply chains by ships entirely dependent on dirty energy. food security is nothing to be trifled with(remember venezuela?)..but labour costs in western nations is nothing to be sneezed at. automation and robotics is the only solution. as long as VCs dont think of it as a data play for commodity ag market only , that tech wont trickle down to food crops. with the current covid crisis, everything will change. everything has to change. local food networks, food security and shorter tighter supply chains are going to become necessary. it's time to automate small acreage food farms and reclassify Ag as essential protected industry. i also expect this covid crisis to facilitate the biggest wealth transfer and land grab in the last hundred years. but i am not betting on anything now. things should get interesting. i hope that automation in ag at all levels become a reality and the sector (hopefully along with healthcare) becomes less exploitative. altho' ag exploits the producers and healthcare exploits the consumers. but that is likely a different topic.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  >automation and robotics is the only solution. Maybe to us idealist techies wishing for a fair world, but to the people with big bucks who own and run the show as long as there is someone willing to work for cheaper than it is to develop, buy and run machines it's not worth investing in automation and the world is currently not in short supply of cheap labor unfortunately. There is always a cheaper place with poor oppressed people ripe for exploitation. Hell, I've worked in tech companies where it was cheaper to send all the mind numbing repetitive stuff nobody wanted to do to some developing nation rather than figuring out how to automate it because management isn't good at thinking long term. Same in the European tech sector, it's cheaper for companies to invest is visa sponsorships, recruitment fees and relocation packages to import devs from developing nations to put downward pressure on the market and create this image of scarcity than it is to invest in the local talent pool to make wages more competitive.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
toohotatopic 7y ago
Funny that they don't explicitly mention the analogy to corona but I guess that's still their point. I am wondering if this is an intended jab at Italy. They could have prevented the spread if they had locked down the region where it was occurring first. This would have been a perfect moment for the EU to shine and to actually resolve an issue. If they had removed all olive trees within hundred kilometers of the original area, the loss of trees would have been huge, but the impact would have stayed small. Like corona, the original areas didn't profit from the loss of their trees so they had no incentive to cut them down. With EU funding, the incentive could have been provided. Similarly, it would have been relatively easy to contain the box tree moth [1] if the first areas had cut down all box trees. They haven't, and now it is a global problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydalima_perspectalis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydalima_perspectalis
emmelaich 7y ago
`cost` not `costs`; per the actual headline.
mikorym 7y ago
To put this in perspective, it has happened before along similar lines in different produce types. For example, almost all of the vineyards in Europe were wiped out in the 19th century [1]. This is why the oldest vineyards in the world are somewhere in South America. (I think Chile?) Today, as we all know, France is still the most important wine producing country. South Africa has 100k hectares of wine; France has 100k hectares of merlot. Yes, people can do more to handle these diseases, but often the simplest way is with a lot of poison, which many people also don't like. Tuta absoluta wiped out 1/2 of the yearly Egyptian tomato crop few years ago and yet it's pretty similar to what we call aartappelmot and unfortunately the way to handle it is with a lot of poison. By the way, this is why I emphasise that policy is not the main issue in agriculture. The issue is efficiency and efficacy. For example, I am working on building a system that improves time of application of pesticides. (Before getting there, there are some lower hanging fruit to pick.) It's a major problem for farmers of all sizes as the people selling the pesticides actually have an incentive to get you to buy more and more. But the key is to apply at the right stage of the particular pest's life cycle. And as someone who likes mathematics, it's satisfying work due to the inherent complexity of agriculture. [1] I think this is the one we're looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight
- clows 7y ago
  A minor difference: > The slow-growing trees take 65 to 80 years to reach stable yields. https://www.hunker.com/13428601/how-long-does-it-take-for-an-olive-tree-to-produce-fruit https://www.hunker.com/13428601/how-long-does-it-take-for-an...
  - mnky9800n 7y ago
    Same for Maple syrup. You plant trees so your kids can make syrup. I'm 34 and if I planted a sugar Bush today I would be dead by the time it's viable.
  - glaberficken 7y ago
    While factually true, this does not apply at all to how olive trees are farmed in intensive plantations in the real world. The typical modern plantation in Spain/Portugal uses very young and small trees (they start giving fruit by year 4) supported by intensive automated watering (typically from nearby dam projects) and with the trees spaced out just right for automated picking. Like this photo: https://images.impresa.pt/expresso/2019-09-06-pag16_T-_IDP.jpg/original/mw-860 https://images.impresa.pt/expresso/2019-09-06-pag16_T-_IDP.j...
extro 7y ago
Possibly related https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/04/07/an-attack-on-greek-heritage-migrants-chop-thousands-of-olive-trees-on-lesvos/ https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/04/07/an-attack-on-greek-her...
mister_hn 7y ago
this is going on since 3-4 years already but no intervention has really taken place. In South of Italy the trees are being removed, but a truly intervention hasn't been deployed.
pvaldes 7y ago
Had created (yet) damages by billions since 2013 is the correct term. Olive Ebola is not a new disease at all. Another case of "as seen in Italy".

148 points by leonagano 7y ago

billions in losses used to sound like a big number, ah the good old days

Get used to it, this will become much more common with climate change. Insect and diseases infestation and ecosystem collapse will be a weekly thing before you know it.

blix 7y ago
I'm not sure climate change bears more blame than agricultural systems that incentivize monocultures fragile in the face of external stresses. Climate change is only one such stress. Crop diseases are as old as agriculture. And really, agricultural collapse is quite separate from ecosystem collapse; agriculture is many ways defined by the intentional absence of ecosystem.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Just going by the wikipedia entry for X. fastidiosa, but "Symptoms of X. fastidiosa diseases worsen during hot, dry periods in the summer: lack of water and maximum demand from a full canopy of leaves combined with symptoms due to disease stress infected plants to a breaking point. Cold winters can limit the spread of the disease;[8] as occurs in California, but not in regions with milder winters such as Brazil." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylella_fastidiosa#Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylella_fastidiosa#Environment) It sounds like this could definitely be related to climate change. I'm sure monoculture agriculture doesn't help, but (based on quick searching) olive trees don't fruit in a commercially viable way until they are 7+ years old and don't reach peak yield until they are 70 years old. If it was purely a monoculture issue, I'd question why it didn't happen sooner given the lead time necessary to increase production.
  - briandear 7y ago
    Yet in 1956 a devastating freeze destroyed the French olive oil industry. So perhaps an argument could be made that if there was more global warming in 1956, the industry would be more robust. We can play the “climate change causes everything bad” game for pretty much anything, but we’d be intellectually dishonest if we denied that climate change could actually have benefits.
    - jchw 7y ago
      This logic feels somewhere along the lines of death as a cure for cancer.
  - blix 7y ago
    I don't think it's necesarily one or the other. Climate change is a stressor, and monoculture makes crops less reseilient to stress. Crops undergo massive failures relatively frequently. Bananas are headed towards their second extinction this half-century. As stresses perhaps become more acute due to a rapidly changing climate and environment, this lack of resliliency may prove quite harmful, more so than the damage that can be reliably attributed to any individual stressor.
    - throwaway5752 7y ago
      I don't know, I actually don't know enough about olive farming practices to know if monoculture is a factor? I assume this is a factor and you are correct. I did find a Nature article about it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y that was pretty useful. Seems to suggest it was a factor and may expand the effected range, but it is also an introduced disease and doesn't require climate change to impact large parts of the Mediterranean coast. edit: You may be interested to know bananas didn't go extinct, per se. Mass market US bananas are propagated clones. We have bred the seeds out of bananas (with rare exceptions), so most large scale agricultural plants are tissue culture or cutting clones. The mass market variety was the Gros Michel/Big Mike, which you can still buy online easily. Panama Rust is adapting to the Cavendish, which was resistant when it became the new US mass market variety after the Cavendish. Greater availability of other varieties would be great. Neither of those are the best bananas out there (Nam Wah, Pisang Raja, and Blue Java are all great).
jeffreyrogers 7y ago
I think it has much more to do with monocropping than with climate change. There are lots of other examples with different crops long before the effects of climate change were noticeable.
- vondur 7y ago
  Yeah, this seems to be similar to what is happening to the banana.
- divinebovine 7y ago
  It has more to do with invasive species than anything. Xyella fastidiosa is native to the gulf coast states in the US. Olives and other species from the old world lack any resistance to the bacteria. This same bacteria causes Pierce's disease in Vitis vinifera, the common grape (from Eurasia). Whereas North American Vitis species are resistant to Xf. There's a lot of research going into solving Pierce's disease here in the US from breading programs to bacteriophages. The later may end up helping solve the same problem in Olives.
tathougies 7y ago
Oh right. Never happened before. Disease is a new thing folks /s
dantheman 7y ago
What does this have to do with climate change?
- briandear 7y ago
  Nothing, but people like to trot out climate change fears at every opportunity. It’s getting to be almost like religious people that want to proselytize at every opportunity.
sdffdsfdsfsddsf 7y ago
Yeah, only germs and fungi grow in warm regions. All higher life forms will rot away. Thankfully, our brains will rot away first.

bsder 7y ago

Maximally efficient is minimally robust.

pacamara619 7y ago
This is so obviously false. Counterexample: Robusta Coffee.
- mrpopo 7y ago
  Why do you say it is obvious? Monocultures were selected at a specific point in time for their properties, which may include robustness, but it doesn't change the fact that they are basically giant colonies of clones. Real long-term robustness in nature comes from genetic diversity, which ensures future pathogens with a particular affinity will not be able to thrive through entire countries/continents.
  - CMCDragonkai 7y ago
    That also applies to people right?
    - Danieru 7y ago
      Do you have some cloning technology we are not aware of? A mono-culture of genetically identical human clones is sci-fi.

ggm 7y ago

Australia has an olive industry. Its small, far smaller than the scale of this problem, but we do, and we make some really good robust EVO. I don't wish this disease on the countries exposed to it, but I do hope we can negotiate better prices for our olive oil and related products selling into Europe and the world. We're also (at least in principle, but there are holes) builders of strong biosecurity boundaries. I'd hope we can avoid this disease for a while until mitigation is worked out. We didn't escape the banana diseases. That was bad :-(

emmelaich 7y ago
Sort of related; Australia has the oldest grape vines. France's (and California's?) were wiped out by a pest. https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/how-drink-wine-worlds-oldest-vines https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/how-drink-wine-worlds-...
- contingencies 7y ago
  Yunnan in China also protected grapes over that period which were planted by French Jesuit missionaries in the 19th century.[0][1] "Somewhere in South America" was mentioned elsewhere in this thread: I suspect there are more locations. Basically, without actually reading any sources, my impression is that the event was severe but its totality was overstated. [0] https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/3943/new-gods-for-frontier-people-missionaries-in-northwest-yunnan https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/3943/new-gods-for-fro... [1] https://supchina.com/2019/07/23/grapes-of-god-smitten-the-transformation-of-cizhong-yunnan/ https://supchina.com/2019/07/23/grapes-of-god-smitten-the-tr...

supernova87a 7y ago

See what happens when trees don't obey social distancing rules!

harikb 7y ago

People will close the article as soon as they read “50 years”. Sometimes science needs to lie a little bit for a cause

barry-cotter 7y ago
And that’s how you burn all trust, like with the WHO lying about masks, human to human transmission of COVID and the effectiveness of border controls. If they’ll lie for the cause and you know it why trust that third is not one of those times?
- harikb 7y ago
  I understand what you are saying. I wish there was a aolution though. Nobody care about anything 5+ years down the road. Everyone magically assumes some magic invention will undo years of ignoring science. Anyways, in this particular case, it is probably not preventable, but I wish we could quantify the effect closer to a year or two.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    Current politicians don't care about anything 5+ years in the future. The youth very well does, see e.g. Fridays for future movement. We need a maximum age for politicians, and mandate ethnic, gender and age diversity in politics. Additionally we have to incentivize long-term thinking and disincentivize short term optimization. As long as we are in capitalism, an idea would be a 2 million dollar bonus to be paid out 20 years after a politician retires - which is only valid if the decisions this politician took during their time in office had a quantifiably positive impact for general society.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      > We need a maximum age for politicians, and mandate ethnic, gender and age diversity in politics. This is a terrible idea. If you can’t vote the power structure will just abuse you without thinking. See the total lack of freedom and respect for children, non-citizens, whether visitors or residents, permanent or temporary, and for felons deprived of a vote. Relying on people being good because it’s nice works much worse than relying on them not harming you because it will have consequences. If you want a representative pool of politicians mandating “diversity” is the wrong way to do it. Use sortition. Draft legislators in much the same way jurors are compelled to serve. I would not want to have this be the only way legislators are chosen because a legislature with an average IQ of 100 where most people had not graduated college does not seem likely to be full of the highly competent. I’d support one chamber chosen this way and another elected though. Competence isn’t the only valuable thing.

jelliclesfarm 7y ago

there is some truth to this. same news was posted here on HN last year. but in reality, there is more to it. yes, there is a pathogen. but EU olive industry is moving to turkey and morocco. why? simple. cheap labour. olive trees can live for a very very long time, but there are two kinds of olives harvested. for oil and then for table olives. the former has been mechanised and the latter is not. so it's expensive. it's cheaper to raze down old olive orchards and just plant new ones. the new ones can be trellised and have dwarf hybrids or disease resistant varieties. also cheaper labour if not grown in the EU. i suspect they'd use that ag land for something else. likely development. the same thing happened in central california. one of the major buyers for table olives from EU stopped orders from california. and entire orchards..thousands and thousands of acres were razed down. they simply moved their business to morocco and turkey. (inside source. cant confirm or verify, but i trust this source.) western countries have this plan to outsource ag to developing nations because of labour. it is the most dumbass strategy ever. it is not going to be like IT has been outsourced. it relies on long supply chains by ships entirely dependent on dirty energy. food security is nothing to be trifled with(remember venezuela?)..but labour costs in western nations is nothing to be sneezed at. automation and robotics is the only solution. as long as VCs dont think of it as a data play for commodity ag market only , that tech wont trickle down to food crops. with the current covid crisis, everything will change. everything has to change. local food networks, food security and shorter tighter supply chains are going to become necessary. it's time to automate small acreage food farms and reclassify Ag as essential protected industry. i also expect this covid crisis to facilitate the biggest wealth transfer and land grab in the last hundred years. but i am not betting on anything now. things should get interesting. i hope that automation in ag at all levels become a reality and the sector (hopefully along with healthcare) becomes less exploitative. altho' ag exploits the producers and healthcare exploits the consumers. but that is likely a different topic.

ChuckNorris89 7y ago
>automation and robotics is the only solution. Maybe to us idealist techies wishing for a fair world, but to the people with big bucks who own and run the show as long as there is someone willing to work for cheaper than it is to develop, buy and run machines it's not worth investing in automation and the world is currently not in short supply of cheap labor unfortunately. There is always a cheaper place with poor oppressed people ripe for exploitation. Hell, I've worked in tech companies where it was cheaper to send all the mind numbing repetitive stuff nobody wanted to do to some developing nation rather than figuring out how to automate it because management isn't good at thinking long term. Same in the European tech sector, it's cheaper for companies to invest is visa sponsorships, recruitment fees and relocation packages to import devs from developing nations to put downward pressure on the market and create this image of scarcity than it is to invest in the local talent pool to make wages more competitive.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

toohotatopic 7y ago

Funny that they don't explicitly mention the analogy to corona but I guess that's still their point. I am wondering if this is an intended jab at Italy. They could have prevented the spread if they had locked down the region where it was occurring first. This would have been a perfect moment for the EU to shine and to actually resolve an issue. If they had removed all olive trees within hundred kilometers of the original area, the loss of trees would have been huge, but the impact would have stayed small. Like corona, the original areas didn't profit from the loss of their trees so they had no incentive to cut them down. With EU funding, the incentive could have been provided. Similarly, it would have been relatively easy to contain the box tree moth [1] if the first areas had cut down all box trees. They haven't, and now it is a global problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydalima_perspectalis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydalima_perspectalis

emmelaich 7y ago

`cost` not `costs`; per the actual headline.

mikorym 7y ago

To put this in perspective, it has happened before along similar lines in different produce types. For example, almost all of the vineyards in Europe were wiped out in the 19th century [1]. This is why the oldest vineyards in the world are somewhere in South America. (I think Chile?) Today, as we all know, France is still the most important wine producing country. South Africa has 100k hectares of wine; France has 100k hectares of merlot. Yes, people can do more to handle these diseases, but often the simplest way is with a lot of poison, which many people also don't like. Tuta absoluta wiped out 1/2 of the yearly Egyptian tomato crop few years ago and yet it's pretty similar to what we call aartappelmot and unfortunately the way to handle it is with a lot of poison. By the way, this is why I emphasise that policy is not the main issue in agriculture. The issue is efficiency and efficacy. For example, I am working on building a system that improves time of application of pesticides. (Before getting there, there are some lower hanging fruit to pick.) It's a major problem for farmers of all sizes as the people selling the pesticides actually have an incentive to get you to buy more and more. But the key is to apply at the right stage of the particular pest's life cycle. And as someone who likes mathematics, it's satisfying work due to the inherent complexity of agriculture. [1] I think this is the one we're looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight

clows 7y ago
A minor difference: > The slow-growing trees take 65 to 80 years to reach stable yields. https://www.hunker.com/13428601/how-long-does-it-take-for-an-olive-tree-to-produce-fruit https://www.hunker.com/13428601/how-long-does-it-take-for-an...
- mnky9800n 7y ago
  Same for Maple syrup. You plant trees so your kids can make syrup. I'm 34 and if I planted a sugar Bush today I would be dead by the time it's viable.
- glaberficken 7y ago
  While factually true, this does not apply at all to how olive trees are farmed in intensive plantations in the real world. The typical modern plantation in Spain/Portugal uses very young and small trees (they start giving fruit by year 4) supported by intensive automated watering (typically from nearby dam projects) and with the trees spaced out just right for automated picking. Like this photo: https://images.impresa.pt/expresso/2019-09-06-pag16_T-_IDP.jpg/original/mw-860 https://images.impresa.pt/expresso/2019-09-06-pag16_T-_IDP.j...

extro 7y ago

Possibly related https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/04/07/an-attack-on-greek-heritage-migrants-chop-thousands-of-olive-trees-on-lesvos/ https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/04/07/an-attack-on-greek-her...

mister_hn 7y ago

this is going on since 3-4 years already but no intervention has really taken place. In South of Italy the trees are being removed, but a truly intervention hasn't been deployed.

pvaldes 7y ago

Had created (yet) damages by billions since 2013 is the correct term. Olive Ebola is not a new disease at all. Another case of "as seen in Italy".