Olive oil output to offset fire damage
A bumper Greek olive harvest this year will offset damage to millions of olive trees by recent forest fires but local farmers will still need years to recover from the destruction, officials said yesterday. «About 4 percent of Greece’s production is gone with the fires in the Peloponnese but given we will have a better harvest than last year – up by about 20 percent – this impact will be offset,» Gregory Antoniadis, head of the bottlers and exporters association, told Reuters. Greek olive oil production last year was about 330,000 tons with this year’s harvest expected to yield about 400,000 tons, despite the forest fires that torched millions of olive trees, homes, and businesses in Greece’s olive heartland. Fires raged mainly in the western and southern provinces of the Peloponnese peninsula which produces about a third of the country’s olive oil, burning at least 4.5 million mature olive trees of the country’s total 110 million trees. Greece is the world’s third biggest producer of olive oil behind Spain and Italy. It exports almost half of its oil, mainly in bulk to Italy. Antoniadis said that while market prices or availability would be unaffected, the impact would be far greater for olive farmers and future crops. «On a local level, the effects are staggering with 60 percent of the region’s income wiped out,» he said. Officials have said new olive trees will need seven to 10 years to grow before they start bearing fruit, if farmers choose to replant them. «Local farmers are now at a loss,» General Confederation of Agrarian Associations President Giorgos Goniotakis told Reuters. «They will need to be supported generously for at least seven or eight years because they will not be able to have any income from lost olive groves.» Olive farmer Fotis Babatzikos did not know whether he would replace his dozens of trees which burned down. «I do not know if I will plant olives again because I don’t know if I will stay in the village,» Babatzikos, 60, from the village of Minthi, told Reuters last week. «I made 2,000 to 3,000 euros a year from the oil and now I will have to wait many years for new oil if I chose to plant them again,» he said.
