Wave upon wave of heat have rolled across Europe this July. In Greece, Europe’s third olive oil producer, heatwaves have been pushing temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, triggering huge wildfires that have scorched large swathes of farmland, burned down olive groves and claimed at least four lives.
Crete, Greece’s holiday island, depends heavily on tourism and agriculture for income. The two industries have been competing this year for the Mediterranean island’s limited reserves of winter rain that sustain it through its year-round planting and harvest season.
Antonis Keramianakis, a vegetable farmer who owns greenhouse installations in the south of Crete, said that the extreme heat of the past two weeks had all but destroyed his entire crop of seedlings, which now need to be regrown. Other vegetable growers in the area face the same challenge, he said.
Doubling the effort will push up prices of what limited crops of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants and peppers will be available in the domestic and European markets when the time for harvest comes in fall and winter, the 42-year-old admitted.
"I will have to replant the plants that were destroyed by the heat and they will have to grow again, so the cost in the final product will be doubled, since I will have to buy the seeds again as well fertilizers, and I will have to pay the workers to work on the same plants again," he said.
Ilias Stefanakis, a melon grower who owns 10 acres of land in Akrotiri, in western Crete, told Sputnik that Greece and the rest of Europe would see far less of this water-intensive crop on the shelves this year following a dry winter and the longest heatwave in the country’s history.
Winter rain reserves were already low in April when the planting started, he said. Heat that set in earlier this month, days before the harvesting was to begin, spoiled much of the crop, while the rest had to be harvested prematurely to protect it from the heat.
"Due to the lack of rain this winter and with the unusual heat of this summer my production is down to one-fourth, and as result I won’t be able to export to Europe as much I wanted to, and the tons I was going to offer to the local market will be much less as well," he said.
The impact of extreme heat will be even more pronounced in the olive oil industry where a lack of water during the hot season may affect production for years to come, Sputnik was told.
Manolis Tsoupakis, a veteran Cretan olive oil maker who co-owns 3,000 olive trees, said younger trees needed around 4 gallons of water a day or else their productivity would drop for the harvest season starting November as well as for another two or three seasons.
As winters become drier, the island has been struggling to stay self-sustaining, and the millions of tourists who have come to Crete this summer have been driving the demand for water upwards, making life harder for local farmers, Tsoupakis confessed.
"So at the moment and for the last month we are in a race against time to manage to secure the necessary amounts of water to cover the needs of the trees during the heatwaves so as to avoid any potential damage to the production in November," he said.
The 70-year-old said he did not expect a good olive harvest this season. Olive oil prices will grow markedly across the globe, he predicted, as heatwaves continue to batter not only Greece but also the world’s four major olive producing nations — Spain, Italy, Morocco and Algeria.