Crisis in Greece: Olive Trees Cut Down for Firewood

With heating oil at around €1.40 a liter and household budgets gutted by the crisis, thieves in Greece have started sawing down olive trees at night and carting them off as firewood. Farmers in Crete, Corinthia, Messinia and Euboea have woken up to find whole groves gone. Here is what is happening, why olive trees cut for firewood are a small story for the industry and a very big one for the families who own them, and what growers can do.

What happened

For most Greek homes outside the big cities, heating has always meant oil. Natural gas is an option in some urban areas; almost everywhere else, the boiler burns heating oil. With the price of that oil around €1.40 a liter, according to Olive Oil Times, and incomes falling hard, people have turned back to fireplaces and wood stoves. Demand for firewood has soared. The government has even stepped in to stop wet wood being sold as dry, and trees on the mountains are being felled illegally by the hundreds.

Now the saws have reached the olive groves. Olive Oil Times reports incidents in Crete, Corinthia, Messinia and Euboea in which groves were entered after dark and trees were cut down and taken away. One case made the Greek news at the weekend: in Aristodimio, in Messinia, intruders entered a property at night and cut six olive trees, each about 70 years old, off at the root, according to the newspaper Taxydromos. The owner was left in shock, and the police are looking for the culprits.

Why it matters

For Greek olive oil as a whole, the damage is minimal, as Olive Oil Times points out. For the families involved, it is a different matter. A great many Greek households own a few olive trees or a small grove, and that grove supplies the family’s oil for the year and, when there is a surplus, a little cash from selling the rest. In a year when every euro counts, losing the trees means buying oil you used to make, and losing income you were counting on.

It is also a slow loss. An olive tree cut at the base is not necessarily dead; olives are famous for sending up new shoots from the stump. But a 70-year-old tree in full production cannot be replaced by next season. It takes years of regrowth or replanting before a tree bears a proper crop again, and the owner loses the harvest in every one of those years.

Olive wood is a tempting target for a reason. It is very dense, so it burns long and hot, and the same density is why woodworkers prize it, as we explained in Olive Wood: Why the Tree’s Timber Is So Prized. And rural crime in olive country is not new; Spain has fought organized theft of olives for years, as in Spain: Arrests reveal major black market for stolen olives in the Antequera area. What is new is thieves taking the tree itself.

What growers can do

There is no clever fix for a man with a chainsaw at two in the morning, but a few things help:

• Report every incident to the police, even small ones. Patterns get patrols; single complaints get filed.
• Photograph your trees and keep a record of the grove, so losses can be proved for insurance or compensation.
• Talk to your neighbors. In a village, a strange truck on a farm track at night is noticed if people know to look.
• Keep an eye on the stumps. If the tree regrows, pick the strongest shoots and prune the rest, and it will come back faster.

If you want to know what kind of trees are at stake, our field guide Olive Varieties of Greece: A Field Guide covers the main ones.

Sources

• Olive Oil Times: Olive Trees Face ‘Death by Saw’ in Greece
• Taxydromos: Μεσσηνία: Οι ελιές έγιναν καυσόξυλα (in Greek)