From the Archive: Crete Counts Its Ancient Olive Trees (2009)

In 2009, scientists set out to catalogue hundreds of Crete’s olive trees — some over a thousand years old — to save them from abandonment as olive prices fell. A quiet story with a painful irony at its heart.

What was reported

An agronomy institute announced a project to catalogue ancient olive trees on Crete, some more than 1,000 years old, in a bid to protect them from neglect. The threat wasn’t storms or disease but economics: with olive prices low, the old groves had become unprofitable to farm, and unprofitable trees get abandoned.

What I make of it now

Here is the irony that should bother anyone who loves this fruit. We marvel at thousand-year-old olive trees as living wonders — and then the market quietly threatens them, not with an axe but with a spreadsheet. When a litre of oil sells for less than it costs to harvest by hand from an ancient, low-yielding tree on a Cretan hillside, the rational move is to walk away — and a tree that survived empires is lost to indifference. It’s the same arithmetic that makes good oil cost what it should: cheap oil has a price, and sometimes the price is a 1,000-year-old tree. Paying a fair amount for honest, traceable oil is, in a small way, how you keep those trees alive.

Originally reported July 2009, on a Cretan olive-tree cataloguing project. The original write-up is no longer online.