Petition focuses growing backlash against companies who dig up thousand-year-old trees to sell to wealthy foreigners
They have witnessed – and withstood – much of Spain’s rich history; their thick, gnarled branches steadily supplying olives to a changing roster of Romans, Moors and Christians. But recent years have seen Spain’s thousand-year-old olive trees face one of their biggest threats to date: a growing demand for unique garden ornaments that has led to the trees being uprooted and transported around the world, from northern Europe to the US and the United Arab Emirates.
“We’re losing some of the biggest and oldest trees of Europe,” said César-Javier Palacios of Madrid’s Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente Foundation. The foundation, dedicated to honouring the memory of one of Spain’s best-known naturalists, recently launched a campaign to try and keep these trees in Spain.
In the past two decades, dozens of companies have sprung up across Spain to feed a robust international demand for ancient olive trees. Palacios says the financial incentive was big, with the oldest trees commanding as much as €40,000 (£30,000) on the international market. But the journey is precarious. “Many of them die on the journey,” he said. “And those that don’t die, instead of living maybe another 1,000 years, they may only live another 50 or 100 years.”
A petition launched by his organisation calling on the EU to protect the trees has received more than 140,000 signatures. “Just like 150 years ago, rich north Americans came to Spain to buy Roman shrines for next to nothing and take them back, stone by stone, we’re again allowing the same plundering of our natural heritage,” reads the petition.
Read more S.: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/31/spain-ancient-olive-trees-threat-garden-ornaments
