SPATA, Greece — In an olive grove at the outskirts of Athens, grower Konstantinos Markou pushes apart the shoots of new expansion to show the stump of a tree — a kind of 150-year-old specimen, he mentioned, that used to be amongst 15 reduce down on his neighbor’s land by way of thieves keen to show it into cash.
Surging olive oil costs, pushed partly by way of two years of drought in Spain, has supposed alternative for criminals around the Mediterranean. Warehouse break-ins, dilution of top class oil with inferior product, and falsification of transport knowledge are on the upward thrust in olive-growing heartlands of Greece, Spain and Italy. And possibly worst of all: Gangs the usage of chainsaws to thieve closely encumbered branches or even complete trees from unguarded groves.
“The olive robbers can sometimes produce more oil than the owners themselves – seriously,” Markou mentioned, sooner than keeping off to patrol his personal grove at dusk.
The crimes imply fewer olives for growers already contending with top manufacturing prices and weather alternate that has introduced hotter winters, main flooding and extra intense wooded area fires. In Italy’s southern Puglia area, growers are pleading with police to shape an agriculture department. Greek farmers need to deliver again a rural police department that used to be phased out in 2010. In Spain, an organization has evolved monitoring units that appear to be olives to take a look at and catch thieves.
The olive groves outdoor Athens are phase of a convention that stretches again to antiquity, on plains that now encompass town’s world airport. Some trees are centuries previous.
Most of the thefts are branches. When a complete tree is reduce down, the thieves usually reduce it up and cargo the items right into a pickup truck, promoting the picket to lumber yards or firewood distributors and taking the olives to an oil mill.
“The (robbers) look for heavily loaded branches and they cut them,” said Neilos Papachristou, who runs an olive mill and nearby grove in a fourth-generation family business. “So, not only do they steal our olives, but they cause the tree serious harm. It takes 4-5 years for it to return to normal.”
The thefts are driving some growers to harvest early, which means accepting lower yields to avoid long-term damage to their trees. That includes Christos Bekas, who was among the farmers at Papachristou’s mill who were dumping their crop into stainless steel loading bins, untying sacks and tipping over tall wicker baskets from the back of their pickup trucks.
Bekas, who owns 5,000 olive trees, suffered repeated raids by thieves before deciding to take an early harvest. That has required more than than 2 1/2 times as much olives by weight to produce a kilogram of oil as last year, he said.
“And all this after we’ve been spending nights guarding our fields,” he said. ”The situation is appalling.”
After many years of expansion, the worldwide olive oil marketplace has been disrupted by way of a just about two-year drought in Spain, which usually accounts for approximately 40% of global provide. It’s anticipated to shrink world manufacturing to two.5 million metric heaps this crop 12 months, down from 3.4 million a 12 months previous.
Benchmark costs in Spain, Greece and Italy for additonal virgin oil reached 9 euros ($4.35 consistent with pound) in September, greater than tripling from their stage in 2019.
That’s translated to raised costs for customers. In Greece, a 1-liter bottle of further virgin oil jumped from $8 to $9 ultimate 12 months to up to $15 this 12 months.
Spanish police mentioned in October that they had retrieved 91 heaps of stolen olives in contemporary weeks. In February, six folks had been arrested in southern Greece for the robbery of 8 heaps of olive oil in a sequence of warehouse break-ins over a number of weeks.
Farmers round Italy’s southwestern port town of Bari say thieves have turn out to be an increasing number of brazen, snatching tractors and dear apparatus at the side of olives.
The regional agricultural affiliation issued a plea for police help following stories that 100 olive trees had been destroyed or severely broken in one incident ultimate month. Gennaro Sicolo, the affiliation’s chief, known as the industrial harm “enormous” and mentioned “farmers must be protected.”
“This is a felony,” Markou, the Greece grower, mentioned of the tree-cutting. “You kill your own history here.”
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AP reporters Ciaran Giles in Madrid, Colleen Barry in Milan and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed to this record.
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