As Panos Adamopoulos was moving the leaves of a bush on his farm in Kyparissia, western Greece, he spotted the primary mangoes, soon to be ripe – his part in a government experiment against climate change.
“Right there!” he shouted.
This fertile land on the coast of the Ionian Sea has been known for many years for the cultivation of olives, but in addition watermelons and other crops.
But even this a part of Greece, which receives more rain than other parts of the country, is battling the results of the drought.
After the warmest winter on record, Greece also experienced the most well liked June and July months since reliable data collection began in 1960.
“There is no winter,” Adamopoulos, 38, told AFP, adding that there had not been a drop of rain on his property since March.
“Without water, there is no farming,” says the farmer whose trees appear to grow all of the option to the Ionian Sea.
Adamopoulos currently earns most of his income from iceberg lettuce.
But with increasingly drier seasons on the horizon, he may soon have to provide up a few of his lucrative but water-intensive crops, corresponding to watermelons.
Adamopoulos is one among a small variety of Greek fruit growers who’re switching to tropical fruits – mangoes, avocados, lychees, cherimoyas and macadamia nuts – which he says are “more resilient” to the increasingly intense heat within the Mediterranean.
Currently, he only grows a couple of dozen mango and avocado trees on his 80-hectare property.
The exotic fruits are adapting so well to their recent environment that Adamopoulos now plans to plant one other 300 trees. He said he has already received orders for his first harvest, which is due later this month.
The initiative is an element of a study by the Greek state agricultural institute Demeter to seek out out whether tropical fruits could help solve the country’s looming drought problem.
No miracle solution
It is about “finding new ways to address climate change and use it to our advantage,” says study leader Teresa Tzatzani.
“It’s hotter all year round now and that’s good for these plants,” she said.
Although avocados already grow on the island of Crete, scientists were unsure whether the tree would adapt to conditions on the Greek mainland.
And although mango trees require little or no rainfall, the last two winters have been unusually dry, Tzatzani noted.
This style of innovation is important to guard the sector from future climate disasters, said Antonis Paraskevopoulos, agriculture director of the Triphylia region.
But currently tropical fruits will not be a panacea.
Currently, only a dozen farmers are participating in this system and about 10 hectares of land are being cultivated.
And while it just isn’t intended to interchange local staples corresponding to olives or oranges, it could complement them, says Tzatzani, who desires to expand the experiment to other Greek regions.
Neighbouring countries are also battling similar problems. In Italy, Sicilian farmers have began growing mangos, bananas and papayas.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that heat waves and droughts will change into more frequent within the Mediterranean region, one among the “hotspots” of climate change.
A “bad year”?
Theodoros Dimitrakakis, one other Greek farmer participating within the initiative, estimates that it’s going to take years before tropical fruit cultivation becomes profitable in Greece.
Despite his enthusiasm for the experiment, the 34-year-old says he cannot afford to devote all his time to it as his major source of income, the olive trees, requires all his attention.
His village, like many others in Greece, is usually without water for several hours throughout the day as a result of planned water shutdowns.
Last 12 months his olive yield was 60 percent below average, Dimitrakakis said.
Although he was an environmental activist during his student years, Dimitrakakis admits that he only recently realized that climate change would affect him so soon.
Now he hopes to persuade other local farmers, a few of whom prefer to consider that it was simply a “bad year”.
