Return to the Olive Farm (The Olive Series Book 4)

by Carol Drinkwater

  ‘France doesn’t even make the top ten,’ he grinned.

  It is a fact that compared to Spain’s 970,000 tons of olive oil produced every year, and climbing, France’s output of approximately 2500 tons is insufficient even for its home market. It is one of the reasons why French olive oil is so hard to obtain outside France.

  ‘Peanuts,’ confirmed the technician. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘we know that we have got the only real solution out there if you want to get away from the old-fashioned pesticides, those that are slowly being withdrawn from the marketplace—’

  ‘—because it is now acknowledged that they are dangerous for our health and the environment?’

  He wagged his head back and forth. ‘Perhaps,’ he allowed eventually.

  ‘So, may I ask why you have gone to this trouble, to the expense of registering this product in France, if it is not financially viable for you here?’

  ‘We are committed to the environment’ was the swift response. ‘We are just like everyone else, you, your family, your olive farming colleagues; we want to see a green future.’

  ‘Are all your products organic?’

  No, this was the only one with an organic ticket. They were marketing several others in France that were not organic. The others were their money-spinners. They were working with fruit arborists and viticulteurs. The latter, the wine industry, was, of course, a hefty business in this country. They did not mention wheat or tobacco.

  ‘Might I suggest that registering a product that carries an organic ticket earns you pittance revenue but is valuable to you because it gives your company a renewed image in the eyes of the world?’

  Along with the giant pesticide producer Monsanto, this company had also been a producer of Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant, the herbicide created from a base of dioxin, used by the US military during the Vietnam War. Between 1962 and 1971, seventy-seven million tons of this herbicide was sprayed from low-flying planes and helicopters into the jungles of South Vietnam to expose the Viet Cong, the enemy hiding within these leafy parcels. It was the key player in America’s Herbicidal Warfare Program.

  The seventy-seven million litres of this plant defoliant sprayed into Vietnam have left residues of destruction that are still being logged. Even today, there exist high incidences of Vietnamese children born without limbs, blind, or stricken with unimaginable cancers. Almost inconceivable are the numbers of stillbirths, miscarriages and other defected newborns. I have travelled in Vietnam and I have met with some of the post-war victims. These figures were not anti-American propaganda, but I refrained from touching on any of this because these men represented a new generation of technicians. Jean-Christophe One, the man who had greeted me at reception, had been with the company for thirty-seven years he mentioned a little later in the conversation. (He certainly did not look old enough.) A swift calculation told me that he must have begun his employment with them in 1972 when the Agent Orange programme in Vietnam had just been called to a halt.

  And what of tobacco sprays? Tobacco is a major crop in Europe. It garners more European funding than any other. I had learned this during my travels in Spain. It is very big business even while, on the one hand, governments are banning smoking in public places. Cigarette packets in Europe and the United States carry the warning that death can result from smoking. Everybody knows it, whether they act upon it or not. Tobacco is bad for your health.

  But I had discovered a fact that I found equally disturbing. Pesticides, insecticides, in the modern understanding of the words, were developed in Italy during the 1820s for use on fruit crops. Those first products were created from a base of ore of arsenic. Even as far back as the 1850s, these chemicals were discovered to be carcinogenic, the mineral ore of arsenic being the culprit, but these sprays were not withdrawn. On the contrary. They are still being developed and today one of the biggest markets for ore of arsenic-based pesticides is the tobacco industry. The crop leaves are sprayed relentlessly with these products known to trigger cancers. Yet still they have not been withdrawn from the market. I have often asked myself whether it is the act of smoking that causes the cancers or the poisons sprayed on to the growing plants to kill off the pests. Perhaps a combination? I put this to these two men and their response was: ‘Our company doesn’t produce a product for tobacco crops. Smoking is bad for you.’

  Neither of them smoked.

  Residue of arsenic has been detected in groundwater.

  What could they tell me about their products and seepage into groundwater?

  The leaflet on the table was pushed a little closer to me and then Jean-Christophe One picked it up and turned it over, pointing to a small box. ‘Here,’ he indicated, ‘it tells clearly at what distance from water this product may be used. Five metres is all in the case of this organic pesticide, which proves how safe it is.’

  And then the direction of the conversation changed, skilfully rerouted. Both men wanted to talk to me about what ‘organic’ really meant.

  ‘You say, you want to run your “little farm organically”. But do you understand what that actually means? You know, we’re working in this business, we see what is going on out there.’

  ‘I am keen to hear what is going on out there.’

  An example, they said. They had eaten together in a very fine restaurant in Montpellier a few weeks earlier and they had ordered bottled water.

  ‘It was organic,’ the dark-haired Jean-Christophe informed me. ‘And you know where it came from?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Organic water in a glass bottle from your country, Ireland. Think of the bilan carbone,’ he said. ‘How ridiculous is that!’

  And they both grinned their expensive smiles, enjoying the joke.

  I had to think for a moment. Bilan carbone? Ah, yes, carbon footprint. Bringing in water from Ireland, the expense of it, the glass bottling … yes, I agreed, it seemed totally unnecessary when France produced very fine mineral water, but what had stopped me in my tracks was the fact that I had not told them I was Irish, and they had not known anything about me, they had both claimed.

  Now I was being regaled with horror stories about the organic and non-organic food markets. Each worse than the last and each narrated to prove to me how squeaky clean their position, the integrity of their company, was, that no such dirty tricks were being played by them.

  I knew that I was out of my depth. Whatever I said or asked, there would be well-constructed counter-arguments.

  ‘What do you have to say about the world’s rising cancer figures?’ I had been reading that very morning an article published in the weekly agricultural journal I subscribed to that the use of chemicals on the land and plants, along with the chemicals used in our daily lives – washing-up liquids, detergents, plastics, paints, but, above all else, the products being ploughed into crops, and inevitably the soil and water sources in which the crops are existing – had caused cancer figures in France to rise over the last twenty years by shocking proportions.

  ‘Leukaemia in children,’ I cited, ‘is on the increase every year. Breast cancer has doubled and prostate has tripled.’

  ‘We are living longer, stuff happens’ was the response. Feeble, by any standards.

  How did they feel about the fact that in a world that was waking up to its environment, the pesticide giants were perceived as the enemy?

  Number One replied that when he shaved in the morning he could look himself directly in the eye. He had nothing to feel responsible about. The second grinned and said, ‘Look, I am not knowingly trying to kill anyone.’

  Both agreed that because they were working and living within the framework of a chemical giant, they knew the truth, they knew what was really going on out there. There were horror stories, sure, but not of their making. Did I know anything about the pig market?

  Nothing at all.

  A large proportion of the pork foodstuffs imported into France – where the growing of genetically modified crops had been halted while the su
bject was studied – had come from pigs that had been fed abroad with genetically modified soya-based feed.

  Monsanto – they did not mention the company’s name – owned and grew Roundup-resistant soya bean plants worldwide. Roundup is the world’s biggest selling pesticide. Their soya plants have been genetically modified to resist Roundup so that their product can be sprayed in vast quantities in their soya fields, killing off every blade of grass, insect, microbe, fungus and ‘weed’ while the crop itself survives, unaffected.

  Recently published data enumerating laboratory test results of genetically modified foodstuffs on human/animal health was deeply worrying to say the least and what is even more horrifying is that Monsanto plays dirty. It is publicly known that they have placed their own people in positions within the FDA (the American Food and Drug Administration), to ease the passage of their products into the marketplace. It has been suggested that they have forced the voting and vetoing powers within other governments, restraining scientifically studied information, to achieve the same results abroad as at home in the States.

  I had little doubt that, on a smaller scale, this company would not be above playing similar tricks.

  I returned to the honeybee and asked them about its demise. The corporate giant Bayer whose product Gaucho, an insecticide sprayed on to sunflowers, had been accused of being responsible for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of honeybee colonies in France. Honeybees regularly gathered pollen in fields of sunflowers down here in the south. As I had learned from François a while back now, a bee has an innate sense of direction, a honeybee out gathering will always find her way back to her hive. However, sunflowers sprayed with Gaucho were fatal to bee colonies. The poison attacked their nervous systems and they lost their sense of direction, could not find their way back to their hives and died by the millions of fatigue in the process of trying to fly home.

  Both men shrugged. ‘The case was lost in court. Insufficient proof.’

  Correct. A month or so before this meeting, the case had been lost in court. (Or won, if you were batting for Bayer.) The reason was that there had been insufficient evidence to prove that it was exclusively this product that had been causing the deaths of so many millions of bees in France. This result in court meant that the product could be sold again. It had been withdrawn from the market during the time of the legal proceedings, but it was now back out there and being used once more on the thousands of hectares of sunflower fields growing in the French countryside.

  The beekeeper associations do not have the financial clout of heavyweights such as Bayer and there is also a strong case to argue that this pesticide was not the sole trigger for the damage being caused. And this is where the chemical companies have the upper hand. For the present, it was proving impossible to lay blame at any one door.

  Possibly – more than possibly – it was the combination of products sprayed on to crops plus the accumulation of permissible quota and the build-up of residues in the soil from the previous seasons that were killing off the bees and other insects.

  ‘Do you have dogs?’ one of the men asked me, interrupting my argument.

  ‘Two. Our third was poisoned by slug pellets sold for use on lettuces. Available to anyone and bought by a neighbour, hidden within food left out to kill wild boar and most unfortunately found by our little hunting dog.’

  They ignored this.

  ‘How do you protect the two you still have against ticks? I bet you dress them with collars to keep the bloodsuckers away?’

  I did.

  ‘Those collars are toxic to bees. Did you know that?’

  I had not known.

  ‘You see, we are living in a world where dangers are everywhere. Organic is not possible. It’s a utopian dream. And pesticides are not as harmful as you would like to think. Besides, and most importantly, we have to feed the planet and that means mass crop production. We and our associates are doing the world a favour. Without us, the planet would starve.’

  I decided to leave it. As I was gathering up my papers, the commercial one of the pair, Jean-Christophe Two, said to me, ‘I want to be straight with you. There is one drawback to our organic product.’

  ‘Really, what is that?’

  ‘It doesn’t work on small farms or isolated trees because it is an attractant. It attracts all the olive flies to it, so if you only have a few trees and your neighbour has many and he does not use this product, you’ll end up with all the local flies in your grove. So, it wouldn’t work for you anyway. Also, you need an agricultural licence …’

  ‘Which we have …’

  This surprised him.

  ‘Our organic product has been created to be sprayed from planes overhead on farms with six or seven thousand trees.’

  The image brought Agent Orange to mind again. It also recalled Andalucía, where the olive groves are far-reaching and where not a blade of grass, not a bird or bee exists within them. Where the planes fly low, dropping thousands and thousands of gallons of liquid poisons, contributing towards Andalucía’s swift passage to a state of desertification, desert conditions. A terrain where, eventually, within twenty years if the soil specialists are to be believed, no trees will grow at all.

  Anti-landscape.

  ‘Sorry, we cannot help you solve your problem.’

  ‘But it is very efficient, even if I say so myself, and I am responsible for this product,’ countered his technical compatriot. ‘If one single bee lands on a sprayed branch, wham, he is dead—’

  ‘Excuse me, don’t you mean fly, not bee?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said abeille, bee.’

  Both men laughed, just a tad uncomfortably. ‘Yes, of course, I was referring to the olive fruit fly, Bactrocera oleae. Silly mistake.’

  Yes, silly mistake.

  I rose, thanked them for their time and returned to my car. I had not known back then, as I sat at the steering wheel deliberating, that over thirty of this company’s products were on a European Blacklist of Dangerous Pesticides.

  It was half past seven. The park was silent, eerily so. No lights on, no activity within the corridors of the chemical giant’s technopole. The managers and officers, sales teams and technicians had driven off for the night to their gated and guarded villas and apartments, secreted somewhere within this perfumed landscape, a ghetto of its own, locked securely away, guarding its sulphurous secrets, which they, working on the inside, were party to and we on the exterior were not.

  *

  The following morning, after not such a restful night, I put in a call to the little bio offices in Nice in the hope that the lovely red-haired technician, Nadine, who had organised the outing with Vincent to the organic farm in February, could drop by and offer me some guidance, as she had promised she would.

  ‘She’s not here,’ I was told by a young man. I requested that she call me back. While I was on the phone in my den, I spotted through the window, ascending from beyond the fig tree, the arrival of the Portuguese accompanied by an entire troop of dusky-skinned men, standing in the rear of the truck like a herd of refugees crossing a border. Were they Arabs or newly arrived from Portugal? They spoke no French. Although Michel had rejected the masons’ advice to knock down and reconstruct the fourth stable wall, the misshapen one, demolition was the name of their game. Drills, dust, everywhere. Hair-line cracks, long, snaking fissures were appearing along the plasterwork and tiled floors of the interior of the main body of the house, caused by perforation vibrations.

  Whenever I called to Francisco, who was back at work with red, weeping eyes, or to one of the Josés to take care, to pay attention, they would shrug and tell me not to worry.

  ‘But I am worried,’ I retorted.

  ‘It’s an old house and it won’t last for ever. That door was coming away in any case.’

  ‘No, it was not coming away! It was perfectly solid until you began trepanning the building!’

  ‘Trepanning, Madame, what is that?’ They walked away, head
s shaking.

  Nothing I said made any difference. Finally, I retreated inside and left them to their destruction, obliged to keep every shutter on the east side of the house closed. This was the area neighbouring my work space. I was at my desk in semi-darkness, an illuminated electric table lamp and candles burning, imprisoned within dust and noise.

  Nadine eventually returned my call. She was leaving the organisation that very afternoon, off to pursue an entirely different career, but she would arrange for someone to contact me. She also informed me that we must register the farm as bio en conversion or there would be no support system, and this involved the completion of various forms, which she would send through to me.

  Minutes later, a heavy file appeared on my computer, which, when I finally managed to open it, contained pages and pages of questions. Even the bureaucracy within the non-pesticide world was stringent.

  I rang Nadine back directly to assure her that Michel would handle this within the next few days, but begged that in the meantime, please, could her replacement, whose name was Cécile, contact me as soon as possible.

  Of course.

  I heard nothing.

  When I called again, Nadine had departed definitively and I learned that Cécile would not be taking up her post for a week or two. Soon, the all but invisible flies would be circulating the groves, preparing to infiltrate the fruits.