Imagine one day strolling through Gabriel Miró square or Alicante’s Parque de Canalejas and not finding the hundred-year-old ficus trees that determine everything that happens around these central points of the capital. Imagine finding instead a splintered dust, arranged like a crater or an anthill mouth. Don’t just think of how your heart would shrink; think also of the loss of tourist appeal and how the lack of visitors and investment would degrade the area and the lives of local people. The Town Hall tells you that the EU demanded it, that they will replace them with pine trees because they are more resistant. Let him live with it, because it is nobody’s fault that they have been mortally sickened by an invasive bacterium.
The almond trees of Alcalalí, Xaló, Balones, Benimantell, Castell de Guadalest and all the municipalities that every six months see their names on the growing list of priority destruction by Xylella fastidiosa are, for their neighbours, even more than ficus trees are for Alicante. Because, as well as being the stars of the green and white landscape that every year at this time of year attracts visitors to the Marinas and Comtat to enjoy the spectacle of flowering, they are the livelihood of many farmers who live from the production of their fruit. The agricultural entrepreneurs of these regions have been stoically contemplating since 2017 how more than 157,000 almond trees have been uprooted and crushed on their plots. And yet, they resist: in Alcalalí they are already celebrating the traditional Feslalí, the festival of the blossoming trees, with the subtitle Alcalalí sense flor, so that no one forgets what is happening there, however far away they may seem from the Valencian citrus orchards.
Where these splinters lie, the silhouette of a Prunus dulcis against the sea and the mountains will never again be silhouetted against the sea and the mountains. Xylella-resistant alternatives are being studied. Maybe carob, maybe olive. What is certain is that there will be no leafy branches to retain the moisture from the mists and direct it underground and no fruit to harvest for many years to come. Without the trees, aridification accelerates, temperatures rise, villages empty. Everything that this Consell claims to be fighting against has been going on for almost five years without the Valencian administration doing anything more than uprooting almond trees in an uncontrollable rage.
Because the Regional Ministry of Agriculture is wrong to insist on applying the protocol for the eradication of healthy specimens, a strategy that in all this time has only proved to be lethal for almond trees and not for Xylella. To uproot trees within a radius of 100 metres from the positive specimen makes no sense in a rugged and diverse orography such as that of the Comtat and the Marinas. To devastate and raze the almond trees in the north of Alicante and the landscape of these valleys is not a conceivable, balanced or motivated solution. It is an absolute failure because the cure is proving to be worse than the disease. Of the 21 plant species affected by the bacterium, only three are crops: the insect vectors of the plague travel from terraces to ravines at different altitudes, from rosemary bushes to gorse bushes, driven by the wind and without GPS to remind them to return to the first infected trunk when they get more than 100 metres away from it. The reality as perceived by those of us who know the area is that the pathogen is not spreading, but rather the Conselleria technicians who carry out the analyses. The X-ray of the situation published with enormous delay by the organism is unreal, but it is still the battlefield plan that guides the Tragsa machines in their killing of flies with cannon shots: while they gnaw almond trees in a field, the bacteria runs free through shady and sunny areas hundreds of metres away from the felling. A catastrophic mistake that we warned about when almost all the 3,400 plots that have been razed to the ground in the last five years still had trees on them.
The noise of the backhoes does not allow the Conselleria to hear the clamour of the Alicante countryside. It is true that since August 2020 the measure has been relaxed by reducing the extermination radius to 50 metres and that there is aid for replanting more resistant species, but the order is still to open a firebreak in the Marina Alta and Comtat that seems to follow a political dotted line. No, eradication is music to the ears of the Conselleria because this protocol allows European funds to be channelled for the grubbing and shredding work, while containment obliges less logging, exhaustive analysis, testing innovative solutions and paying for this effort with their own funds. But the Botànic’s survival comes before that of the Muntanya.
In 2022 we celebrate this festival without flowers and with anger, hoping that the voice of those affected by Xyllella will be heard. It is sad to explain to neighbours and tourists that there are no almond trees in bloom because the Conselleria de Agricultura y Transición Ecológica has crushed them… It will be even sadder to tell a grandchild that they were removed because it was very profitable for the Administration even though it was a ruin for the farmers.
José Vicente Andreu Marcos
President of ASAJA Alicante