Olive tree disease across Europe 'could costs billions'

I did find a Nature article about it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y that was pretty useful. Seems to suggest it was a factor and may expand the effected range, but it is also an introduced disease and doesn't require climate change to impact large parts of the Mediterranean coast.

edit: You may be interested to know bananas didn't go extinct, per se. Mass market US bananas are propagated clones. We have bred the seeds out of bananas (with rare exceptions), so most large scale agricultural plants are tissue culture or cutting clones. The mass market variety was the Gros Michel/Big Mike, which you can still buy online easily. Panama Rust is adapting to the Cavendish, which was resistant when it became the new US mass market variety after the Cavendish. Greater availability of other varieties would be great. Neither of those are the best bananas out there (Nam Wah, Pisang Raja, and Blue Java are all great).

yes, there is a pathogen. but EU olive industry is moving to turkey and morocco. why? simple. cheap labour. olive trees can live for a very very long time, but there are two kinds of olives harvested. for oil and then for table olives. the former has been mechanised and the latter is not. so it's expensive.

it's cheaper to raze down old olive orchards and just plant new ones. the new ones can be trellised and have dwarf hybrids or disease resistant varieties. also cheaper labour if not grown in the EU. i suspect they'd use that ag land for something else. likely development.

the same thing happened in central california. one of the major buyers for table olives from EU stopped orders from california. and entire orchards..thousands and thousands of acres were razed down. they simply moved their business to morocco and turkey. (inside source. cant confirm or verify, but i trust this source.)

western countries have this plan to outsource ag to developing nations because of labour. it is the most dumbass strategy ever. it is not going to be like IT has been outsourced. it relies on long supply chains by ships entirely dependent on dirty energy. food security is nothing to be trifled with(remember venezuela?)..but labour costs in western nations is nothing to be sneezed at.

automation and robotics is the only solution. as long as VCs dont think of it as a data play for commodity ag market only , that tech wont trickle down to food crops. with the current covid crisis, everything will change. everything has to change. local food networks, food security and shorter tighter supply chains are going to become necessary. it's time to automate small acreage food farms and reclassify Ag as essential protected industry.

i also expect this covid crisis to facilitate the biggest wealth transfer and land grab in the last hundred years. but i am not betting on anything now. things should get interesting.

i hope that automation in ag at all levels become a reality and the sector (hopefully along with healthcare) becomes less exploitative. altho' ag exploits the producers and healthcare exploits the consumers. but that is likely a different topic.

Maybe to us idealist techies wishing for a fair world, but to the people with big bucks who own and run the show as long as there is someone willing to work for cheaper than it is to develop, buy and run machines it's not worth investing in automation and the world is currently not in short supply of cheap labor unfortunately. There is always a cheaper place with poor oppressed people ripe for exploitation.

Hell, I've worked in tech companies where it was cheaper to send all the mind numbing repetitive stuff nobody wanted to do to some developing nation rather than figuring out how to automate it because management isn't good at thinking long term.

Same in the European tech sector, it's cheaper for companies to invest is visa sponsorships, recruitment fees and relocation packages to import devs from developing nations to put downward pressure on the market and create this image of scarcity than it is to invest in the local talent pool to make wages more competitive.