Olive oil soars, and thieves go after century-old trees in the Mediterranean
latimes.com
latimes.com
This is "selling the last harvest before the storm" behaviour. You would think an olive stealing gang knew there was a smaller crop next year if you chainsaw the limbs of the tree off.
"I don't care" is awful. Analogies to the hive stealing in NZ come to mind, Manuka honey is so valuable, its frequently stolen by the same bike gangs which do meth dealing.
Like any other kind of poaching. Killing elephants for their tusks, or killing sharks for their fins.
People are fucking selfish, short-sighted assholes.
More seriously - that's a funny evolutionary result isn't it, (exactly) two sets of teeth in life?
Orcas kill great white sharks only to eat the liver. Your intestinal bacteria will kill you (and themselves with you) if they escape into your circulatory system.
There are many more examples of creatures being fucking selfish, short-sighted assholes. I guess it's inevitable when life evolves competing for resources, although we, as higher intellects, should know better.
That's why you are constantly generating a mucus layer with extreme diversity of sugar linkages, so that they are fed without one bacteria being able to take over the whole area (basically taming them). If instead you try to eradicate them with antibiotics (i.e. nuclear bombs) then you will inevitably breed ones that will kill you.
EDIT: one more bit of historical perspective. Myth says that Athena and Poseidon had a contest to see who would be the patron of Athens. Poseidon gave the gift of a saltwater spring (to which I guess the Athenians said, "uhh, thanks, I guess."). Athena gave the gift of the olive tree. Obviously Athens is named after her. So that's how much they valued those trees.
Israel’s Campaign Against Palestinian Olive Trees
http://yris.yira.org/global-issue/6018
https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-settlers-destroy-350-tr...
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/6/our-hearts-burn...
I believe that's said because the olive trees live for a long time (hundreds of years), not because they grow slowly. They reach maturity in less than 10 years, producing around 40 kg of olives, so if you are not very old you would probably see the fruits of the tree you planted.
Reminds me of the Bologna/Aquino Paper on society collapsing due to excessive deforestation: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6?error=coo... Thrill read.
The price for virgin olive oil used to be 3-4 €/liter in the last couple of years and now it has soared to above 10 €/L. You can find some local producers (relatives/friends) selling for around 8 €/L but most people in the big cities will never see such a low price, on the contrary it will reach them for around 15 €/L :-(
Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal (among other Mediterranean countries) rely heavily on olive oil for food preparation and this will affect prices and inflation.
The level of impact of such things is definitely still actively studied, but some fats do generally seem worse for you to consume than others.
Now, anyone arguing eating a bottle of olive oil a week will cure your cancer is obviously full of it, but choosing different oils because of ratios of saturated fats and what not isn't entirely new-agey fluff.
Someone saying they are suspicious of "the claim" isn't required to back their suspicions.
You are welcome to fact-check the entire narrative: which would boil down to fact-checking the original olive oil diet health claim.
If someone shouts "1+1=2 is propaganda!", the burden of proof should be on them even though almost everyone they meet will not have gone through the mathematical proof that 1+1=2 themselves (a 360 page proof, not an easy task). We're all just taking someone else's word for it + using our own common sense. We can find many other examples, but the gist is if something is well established in society, not just from cultural institutions but from educational and scientific ones as well, a claim that society is lying to us for whatever reason has the much stronger burden of proof.
OK.
> The claim that it's all propaganda requires a stronger burden of proof IMO.
Why? If it's so well known, then it should be trivial for you to prove!
The burden of proof is on the claimant, because that's the person who has proof to begin with!
---
> If someone shouts "1+1=2 is propaganda!", the burden of proof should be on them even though almost everyone they meet will not have gone through the mathematical proof that 1+1=2 themselves
The words "is propaganda" are carrying your entire point. The tricky bit is that there are two distinct things begging for evidence in your example:
1. The claim that 1+1=2
2. The claim that claim #1 is propaganda.
Each claim has (or lacks) a separate body of evidence. The burden of proof for each claim is whoever made that claim.
Importantly, propaganda itself does not require falsehood. Both the claim that 1+1=2 and the claim that mathematics are propaganda could be correct regardless of the other.
Because of that, any evidence that MeImCounting would be able to provide that "[olive oil diet] 'health reasons' are mostly propaganda" would fail to answer the pertinent question, "Are there valid health reasons for an olive oil diet?"
[1] https://www.drfabio.com/healthblog/cooking-oil-comparisons
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8504498/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095528630...
I am somewhat shocked though to see such strong opinions about the health benefits of olive oil or the lack thereof. Here I thought it was just a tasty oil.
e.g Walnut oil can be used a salad dressing , heating it is bad.
Traditional Mediterranean cooking uses olive oil for everything, and at high temperatures, to be honest, I think it is a waste as you don't get its characteristic taste. We once did a fondue with extra virgin olive oil (we usually use cheaper oil for that, but that's the only thing we had left), and we got essentially none of the taste.
This is incorrect. The majority of olive oil is used in foods that are cooked in the oven, or on the stove top (or pressure cooker)
source: decades lived in (around?) the Mediterranean
The taste isn't the same, just as it's not the same the taste of a good olive oil from a normal one.
Pig fat has been on decline for a long time, but it's still used for some things. Butter is not that cheap, margarine isn't either, and it's not as good (in either taste or "health" reasons).
Olive oil is a staple in our kitchens, and things should change a lot before we stop using it. It's like telling Asian people to change and not use soya when it becomes expensive.
I was in Portugal a couple of months ago, and our local tour guide said the drought conditions meant we should expect to pay 3x the price for olive oil over the next year or two.
It looks like it rained quite a bit in the past month, though, so if that has turned things around for them, then I am very pleased.
The current article is kind of a reminder that the safety of crops / the difficulty of theft is variable with context; it's not just an attribute of the crop-type. If this continues, I wonder if we'd see tree-owners engage in something like tree-spiking, so it's literally unsafe to cut their trees.
And then the potato blight happened.
Which England naturally didn't help out relieving.
The first year the Famine Relief provided by the British Government was better than anything anywhere else in Europe, (which was also affected).
The second and third years the pressure on the Treasury was such that Westminster wanted the rich Irish to also contribute, (Ireland wasn't subjected to the Income Tax being paid in Britain). The Irish refused and so in response Westminster dumped the problem of Famine Relief entirely on Irish local government, which was simply incapable to take on such a mammoth task.
(The reason why the Treasury couldn't afford to borrow the money required was that they had just recently borrowed huge sums of money to buy the freedom of all the slaves in the British Empire).
If you ever wondered where that bit from South Park came from with the Mongolians that's where. But spoiler Genghis Khan found a way around that problem.
The most famous parts of the Great Wall were built in the Ming Dynasty, but stretches of the wall were first built centuries before:
>...Several walls were built from as early as the 7th century BC,[4] with selective stretches later joined by Qin Shi Huang (220–206 BC), the first emperor of China. Little of the Qin wall remains.[5] Later on, many successive dynasties built and maintained multiple stretches of border walls. The best-known sections of the wall were built by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
It was Kublai Khan who founded the Yuan dynasty.
>...After two decades of sporadic warfare, Kublai Khan's armies conquered the Song dynasty in 1279 after defeating the Southern Song in the Battle of Yamen, and reunited China under the Yuan dynasty
Also something similar happens in the West Bank: [1] https://time.com/5714146/olive-harvest-west-bank/ [2] http://yris.yira.org/global-issue/6018
Historically this was done mostly by some ethnic groups, I'm not sure if now there other forces or people behind it, as police forces have been more of less sleeping on this since it has been a "country problem" not a "city one" and as it has some ethnicities attached to it, the media also avoids to touch it, so the answer is: most of us don't really know what's going on in a deep way.
In normal conditions, Ukraine would be the world largest producer of sunflower seed oil.
Just some math: 9% of edible oil production is sunflower oil.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
Ukraine historically produced 1/4 of that 9%
https://latifundist.com/en/rating/uzhe-razlili-maslo-rejting...
Let’s rule of thumb this and say production is half what it was in Ukraine (and assume nobody else has switched to edible oil crops and Ukraine doesn’t produce other edible oil crops, both probably false).
That means there is 1.1% less edible oil going around this year for that reason.
I think this is within the noise of good crop vs bad crop years, and edible oil is pretty elastic in use.
> Cause or convenient excuse
> to raise prices?
Also, to answer your question, sellers leveraging the shortage caused by the war in Ukraine is also a result of the war in Ukraine.
The keyword here is diseases. Olive tree tuberculosis for example will easily propagate if you use the same pruning tool on different trees without disinfecting it.
This is not a joke. We are talking about estimated damages of 20 billion euro (with a B) that the European Union has been suffering just by Xylella fastidiosa, the "olive tree ebola" at a rate of 5.5 billion bleed each year since it appeared in Apulia Italy on 2013 and later on Spanish almonds in 2016. The disease can affect olives, almonds, figs, plums or cherries. It has 500 species of hosts.
Several new plagues entered inexplicably by Italy or Spain in the last decades. We should treat it much more seriously.
i.e. we are beginning to see the impacts of climate change on the food supply in Europe.
Olive trees are low stakes, but ultimately a sign that climate change is moving north.
The main limiting factor for crop productivity is sunlight, and vertical farms drastically reduce the sunlight-to-plant ratio. They are only productive if substantial artificial light is provided, but this is very expensive. This is why vertical farms are generally limited to locations where land values are very high (such that it is more economical to artificially light crops than to simply grow on a larger plot of land) and there is substantial government investnebt to growing food locally, even though it is much more expensive than importing food. For example, we see veryical farms in Singapore because it is striving to be more self-sufficient for defense reasons in the event of war.
It is no solution for most countries, particularly countries that have rural regions suited to agriculture.
Being self-contained is something the West is incredibly bad at, and has been for (checks calendar) at least half a millennium. Depending on how much you think counts.
So, neoliberals and those who keep them in power.
The estimates vary but something close to 80% of water in Spain is spent on agriculture. You have large areas of Murcia and Andaluzia pretty much covered in canvas greenhouses.
A large fraction of this water for farming is spent producing year round tomatoes, strawberries, avocados, etc.
Much of these fresh produces is exported so it has nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with profit. Farmers are actively selecting profitable water intensive crops while externalizing the cost of creating water scarcity.
Edit: Everybody is remarkably similar when it comes down to their desire to make money @fragmede
It's probably not. Regional draught conditions over multiple years is a common thing. The USA had very hot temperatures for a decade in the 1930s for instance and this is just 1 of many examples.
Climate change isn't really a local thing like this is. The region has had multi-year droughts many times in the past and will have them in the future too. Climate change could make them more extreme, to be sure.
But claiming that this is from climate change just does more to discredit it, and more-so the people who are climate doomers, than anything.
Winters have become increasingly milder across the mediterranean for the past 20 years, ask anyone, it is very noticeable.
September use to be the end of Holiday season now you have locals going to the beach in late October with +25 Celsius.
This means that reservoirs and river aquifers are not getting filled up during winter generating progressively more agressive draughts.
It's not the end of the world, people will find a way, but luxuries like golf courses and year round strawberries will likely need to be curbed.
That disease will do to Mediterranean olives what citrus greening did to Florida oranges
There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.
But I did see a lot of unharvested resources; olives, oranges, lemons etc.
This is definitely an area where robotics and AI would be very useful
Or were there other factors at play (family farm, horticulture education, non-euro remuneration etc)
If olive oil was just used for flavoring, emulsification and dipping bread in we'd have a huge over supply - too many people were raised on "Drizzle some olive oil in your pan before heating".
Seed oil?
Cause no thank you!!
Luckily everyone seems to think animal fats are no good, so my family gets grass fed tallow for $30 a gallon tub.
Tallow and lard are excellent for frying or fattening bready items.
I'd love to get "grass finished" tallow for anywhere near that price.
It's a local farmer. Only the last two months are grain.
I was getting Grass fed and Finished before I moved.
Grass fed and grain finished meat tastes better though the health benefits may be lesser. IDK
I'm pretty sure I can taste the difference between popping corn in peanut oil vs. olive oil. In any case, I can certainly smell the difference which affects taste.
> and olive oil actually has a relatively low smoke point compared to other cooking oils.
I'm pretty sure I've popped corn with olive oil on multiple occasions without hitting the smoke point.
And for things like pasta sauces or roasting potatoes it's not even close to the smoke point.
There's also a fringe health benefit. Because high quality extra virgin olive oil is so difficult to find-- and so expensive-- relying on it as one's sole cooking oil essentially adds a tax to frying the hell out of all one's foods. This encourages healthier eating. :)