A harvest of bounty and woe

Gregorio Lopez is not about to let falling wholesale olive oil prices drive him out of business. He has whipped his olive groves in southern Spain into high-production mode: replanting trees closer together, removing extraneous vegetation, adding irrigation systems, and trying to perfect his pesticide regime.

"There's a commercial war in the olive business," he says, inspecting the trees that have been in his family for generations here in the rolling Andalusian hills. "And the only way to compete is to raise production."

Driving the competition is a European Union policy that provides a subsidy based on volume - the more you produce, the more subsidy you get. The resulting production boom has driven down prices, encouraging even more-intensive farming to maintain profits.

It has also increased soil erosion, water usage, and pesticide contamination in an area so environmentally sensitive that experts estimate that 20 percent of Spain is turning into a desert.

With similar problems across many European countries, the EU olive-oil subsidy has become a focal point for those hoping to bring Europe's agricultural policies in line with its stated goals of environmental preservation.

Pressure at the November WTO meeting to decouple agriculture subsidies from production volume may eventually increase the political will for change. The European Union has already disconnected beef supports from production output and made other changes in the Common Agricultural Policy, which also governs the olive-oil subsidy. But under agriculture industry pressure, the EU recently voted to postpone further discussion of the olive-oil subsidy until 2003.

The issue of soil degradation has gained additional visibility with a recent UN-European Union report describing it as the continent's "silent disaster." "The sustainable use of soils is one of Europe's greatest environmental, social, and economic challenges," says United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) executive director Klaus Töpfer.

As Europe's forests were cut down over the centuries for fuel, housing, and crop-growing, erosion was kept at bay through traditional farming techniques, maintenance of sufficient ground cover, and labor-intensive practices such as terraced fields.

But following World War II, as Europe lifted itself from post-war basket case to economic powerhouse, an agricultural policy focused single-mindedly on increasing food production has encouraged the growth of high-intensity monoculture and seriously threatened the continued fertility of the continent's soil.

One of the most dramatic consequences of poor soil maintenance is desertification, a problem that afflicts, within Europe, the Mediterranean countries of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece.

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