Tick tock If you go to any Spanish countryside and stay very still, very silent; Immediately, you will start listening to it. Tick tock, tick tock. It’s subtle, I admit. Almost imperceptible if you don’t pay attention. But it is there and no one can deny it: a ticking time bomb within the country’s agribusiness in the form of the 126,000 hectares of almond plantations that are about to come into production.
It is the chronicle of an announced crisis.
The almond, the fashionable fruit. In 2016, Javier López-Bellidoprofessor at the School of Agricultural Engineers of the University of Castilla – La Mancha, He told me he was worried because “lately, there is no conversation with farmers that does not include the word ‘almond tree’.” And there were good reasons for it; although they can all be summarized in the same way: a hectare of almond trees is twice as profitable as one of oranges.
According to experts, it also had a wonderful future: “The demand market for almonds is on the rise throughout the world, so all experts agree that, at least within the next decade, this nut will have a great market outlet, especially abroad,” said Doménec Nàcher by Asaja in El Mundo.
However, López Bellido I wasn’t so clear. This trend was going to translate into many farmers going into debt with an eye on the high prices of almond grains and they were going to find a saturated market that was going to suffocate them little by little.
And that, word for word, is what is happening. And it’s been 10 years. Today, Spain is the second largest producer in the world almond In fact, the almond tree is already the most extensive woody crop in Spain and only in the last decade has grown 34%.
Furthermore, as I said, right now there are 126,000 hectares of almond trees that have not yet matured enough. But they will.
The thing is that we have already seen this movie. It is literally the same mechanism that has caused the lemon crisis: first a price-pull effect, then uncontrolled expansion and, later, calm while those trees reach production age. A calm that lasts until the almonds reach a saturated market and everything collapses.
We know what is going to happen, but no one is very clear how to stop it. And that is the great drama of the Spanish countryside. One of many, it is true; but an especially bloody one: one that takes advantage of the desperation of farmers and ends up leaving them bankrupt.
And of those dusts, these sludge.
Image | Mercedes White
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