Olive tree disease across Europe 'could costs billions'

To put this in perspective, it has happened before along similar lines in different produce types.<p>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?)<p>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 <i>of merlot</i>.<p>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&#x27;t like. <i>Tuta absoluta</i> wiped out 1&#x2F;2 of the yearly Egyptian tomato crop few years ago and yet it&#x27;s pretty similar to what we call <i>aartappelmot</i> and unfortunately the way to handle it is with a lot of poison.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s life cycle. And as someone who likes mathematics, it&#x27;s satisfying work due to the inherent complexity of agriculture.<p>[1] I think this is the one we&#x27;re looking for: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Great_French_Wine_Blight" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Great_French_Wine_Blight</a>

there is some truth to this. same news was posted here on HN last year. but in reality, there is more to it.<p>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&#x27;s expensive.<p>it&#x27;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&#x27;d use that ag land for something else. likely development.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s time to automate small acreage food farms and reclassify Ag as essential protected industry.<p>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.<p>i hope that automation in ag at all levels become a reality and the sector (hopefully along with healthcare) becomes less exploitative. altho&#x27; ag exploits the producers and healthcare exploits the consumers. but that is likely a different topic.

Funny that they don&#x27;t explicitly mention the analogy to corona but I guess that&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t, and now it is a global problem.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cydalima_perspectalis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cydalima_perspectalis</a>

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.<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>We&#x27;re also (at least in principle, but there are holes) builders of strong biosecurity boundaries. I&#x27;d hope we can avoid this disease for a while until mitigation is worked out. We didn&#x27;t escape the banana diseases. That was bad :-(

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

Possibly related <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greekcitytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;07&#x2F;an-attack-on-greek-heritage-migrants-chop-thousands-of-olive-trees-on-lesvos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greekcitytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;07&#x2F;an-attack-on-greek-her...</a>

Maximally efficient is minimally robust.

See what happens when trees don&#x27;t obey social distancing rules!

Had created (<i>yet</i>) damages by billions since 2013 is the correct term.<p>Olive Ebola is not a new disease at all. Another case of &quot;as seen in Italy&quot;.

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

this is going on since 3-4 years already but no intervention has really taken place.<p>In South of Italy the trees are being removed, but a truly intervention hasn&#x27;t been deployed.

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