A Spanish Town Withers With the Olive, Its Tree of Life
ARIEL BOLUDOVSKY
By RENWICK McLEAN
Published: November 3, 2005
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.
Denis Doyle for The New York Times
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.
Natural
"ARIEL BOLUDOVSKY" <bolud...@hotmail.co.il> escribió en el mensaje
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