When the name "Xylella fastidiosa" appeared in 2013, public opinion was swept away by a wave of fear: an unknown bacterium, described as incurable, capable of transforming Apulian olive trees into gray skeletons. In reality-as detailed in the new WWF report, "The Annoying Xylella: The Two Faces of Agriculture"-the story is much more complex. It is not just the story of a plant epidemic, but of a profound clash between two agricultural models, two ideas of land, and two different concepts of land care.
The institutional management immediately began with the tone of a state of emergency, from the bacterium to a permanent emergency: red zones, forced felling, thousands of healthy trees uprooted "within the radius," mass monitoring, and bans on replanting. All in the name of a supposed eradication that EFSA-the European Food Safety Authority-had already declared impossible in 2015.
And yet it continued for years: a never-ending emergency, useful to justify extraordinary procedures, opaque tenders, derogatory hiring, and a constant flow of public funds lacking any real transparency. Meanwhile, the landscape was being emptied, local communities deprived of the right to decide what to do with their trees, and the centuries-old olive trees-a unique ecological and cultural heritage-treated as obstacles to be eliminated rather than allies in protecting the land.
The real plan is to destroy the past to impose intensive farming. The WWF precisely reconstructs the pattern that has prevailed in the area: the replacement of the traditional landscape with intensive and super-intensive systems. Close rows of identical trees, massive irrigation, fertilizers, chemicals, mechanization: a model that in an arid and fragile land like Puglia sounds like an ecological doom.
This model isn't "modernization": it's a simplification of living things, a loss of biodiversity, and a total dependence on industrial inputs. And it's also an excellent profit opportunity for the giants of nursery and agrochemical industries, and for the strongest segments of privately-owned agriculture, which the rhetoric of the emergency has transformed into "saviors of the sector." In this transition, Xylella was the key: not the problem, but the pretext. The emergency allowed what, under normal conditions, would have generated strong social opposition to be portrayed as inevitable.
But Puglia isn't just about intensive farming. There's another kind of agriculture, too often invisible, that cares for the land: that of centuries-old olive trees, complex agroecosystems, and respectful soil management. It's precisely the farmers of this tradition who have paid the highest price: abandoned by the institutions, blamed, branded as "deniers." Yet it was they who first experimented with practices of coexistence with the bacterium, without waiting for directives from above.
Years later, the WWF report documents the existence of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of resilient olive trees, once thought doomed, yet now thriving and producing again. This recovery was made possible by agroecological practices-active soil management, reduced use of chemicals, and increased biodiversity-which demonstrate how the trees' vitality is linked more to the quality of the ecosystem than to the presence of the bacterium itself.
This reality should not have emerged, because it challenges the single narrative of the incurability and necessity of industrial eradication. For years, many researchers and technicians have reiterated that eradication was the only solution, transforming opinion into dogma and a hypothesis into indisputable truth. Some public research has been aligned with the interests of agrochemicals, ignoring studies on the role of soils, and closing the door to any agroecological approach.
Meanwhile, those who studied alternatives were marginalized. Those who proposed nonviolent methods for olive tree management were ridiculed. And a paradox arose: the scientific community refused to study what was actually happening in resilient olive groves, preferring to confirm their own hypotheses rather than observe the landscape.
Here a fundamental question arises: who decides what constitutes science when science becomes a tool for legitimizing power?
If public research ceases to respond to the needs of the local area and becomes subordinated to the interests of industrial supply chains, who will defend the landscape, biodiversity, and peasant labor?
The destruction of centuries-old olive trees isn't just an agricultural problem: it's an attack on the land as a common good. Those trees don't belong only to their owners: they belong to communities, to collective history, to the memory of places. Replacing them with intensive plantations means transforming a community landscape into an agricultural factory. It means stripping communities of a piece of their identity. It means taking away autonomy, replacing age-old knowledge and practices with top-down industrial protocols.
The WWF report concludes clearly: the management of Xylella has revealed the profound crisis of the agro-industrial model and the need for an agroecological shift.
But this shift cannot come from above: it must come from those who live in the land, from those who cultivate it without exploiting it, from those who have no interest in chemicals and monocultures. It's a political issue, even before it's an agronomic one. It's the question of who decides the future of the land: communities or multinationals? It's the clash between an agriculture that devastates and one that protects, between those who see olive trees as obstacles and those who see them as ancestors. The Xylella affair demonstrates that agroecology is not a utopia. It already exists, it endures, it produces. It is agriculture that makes no noise but holds together landscapes, communities, and freedom. And as always, the problem is not the bacterium. The problem is the model.
Totò Caggese
https://umanitanova.org/fastidiosa-emergenza-xylella-cronaca-di-unagricoltura-che-muore-e-di-unaltra-che-resiste/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #2-26 - Annoying Emergency. Xylella: Chronicle of a Dying Agriculture and a Resilient One (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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