The leaves wither and face down as if to escape the sun; the roots darken and rot. Then the leaves fall. Within 10 days, all of them are gone, leaving the fruit under the sun. Within one or two years, the plant dries up and dies. There is no known cure.
In Italy, kiwifruit trees are dying en masse and no one knows why.
Last month, the Italian government announced a task force to study a mysterious sickness that is devastating kiwifruit orchards in the country, leaving scientists baffled.
“Damages to production are causing serious suffering to farms,” Italian Minister of Agriculture Teresa Bellanova said, calling the situation an “emergency” and saying that the country needs “help from all the experts.”
After breaking out near Verona in 2012, the syndrome, which farmers call moria, or “die-off,” has ravaged areas where kiwifruit trees have thrived for decades. Recent estimates suggest that it now affects 25 percent of kiwifruit orchards in Italy, the world’s second-largest producer of the fruit — above New Zealand and below China — and is causing losses worth hundreds of millions of euros.
In some farming hotspots, the number of affected plants rises to 80 percent.
Yet researchers say the real numbers could be even higher.
Because the syndrome starts in the roots, it can spread unobserved until the first leaf symptoms. By then, the decline is already too advanced.
“It’s like the coronavirus, if you will: When the symptoms appear, it’s already too late,” said Gianni Tacconi, a genomics researcher with Italy’s Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA), who has studied kiwifruit since the early 2000s. “It’s difficult for humans to heal; for kiwi trees, I’d say it’s impossible.”
Researchers have looked for the cause in irrigation practices, bacteria, fungi, soil composition and specific replant disease, but found no clear culprit.
ANOMALIES
The more they studied, the more anomalies cropped up.
The syndrome has struck old and young trees, on virgin soil and decades-old farms, killing trees at lightning speed, but sparing others a few meters away.
Nothing seems to stop it.
Studies have found a kaleidoscope of pathogens in sick trees, but none was present in every ailing plant.
Scientists say that several factors — water, soil oxygen levels, global warming and fungi — are in play, but they cannot explain how or why the sickness exploded in areas where kiwifruit growing used to be easy.
“It’s very difficult to study something like this,” said Lorenzo Tosi, a researcher with research company Agrea. “When we want to understand the cause of something, we try to isolate it and run an experiment, but that doesn’t work this time because several factors are in play. Everything seems to contradict something else.”
Beyond the syndrome, there has been an acceleration in serious plant diseases in Italy, Tosai said.
A mysterious sickness seemingly linked with warmer temperatures has killed many apple trees; a fungus has wrecked this year’s pear harvest; and the southern Puglia region is grappling with a bacterium threatening to wipe out olive trees.
“There are signs that something is putting a strain on crops,” Tosi said. “I have the impression kiwi trees might just be the first of many.”
Researchers have observed similar decline symptoms in kiwifruit orchards in France, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Japan and China, but nowhere have they been as explosive as in Italy.
Near Verona, the syndrome has struck down 84 percent of trees.
“This year, everything died,” said Corrado Mazzi, a grower whose orchards near Verona are ailing.
In the area, farmers have started to abandon kiwifruit fields and empty structures make for ghostly sightings from the roads.
Mazzi has been growing kiwifruit trees using the same techniques since the middle of the 1980s until the first symptoms of moria appeared in 2012.
“Between 2014 and 2015, we lost everything,” he said.
Mazzi uprooted all of his trees in 2015 and followed the best farming practices, then planted new ones from 2016 to 2018, but the moria came back.
‘NOTHING WORKS’
“You can try all you want, but nothing changes,” he said. “In two or three years, you are back to the start.”
His production is down 75 percent compared with 2010 and 2011.
With answers lacking, some researchers have suggested that climate change might be behind the decline, weakening the trees and altering soil equilibrium.
Some studies suggest that the ideal temperature for growing kiwifruit trees is between 25°C and 27°C, but global warming and recurring heatwaves have pushed summer temperatures up.
“I still have a lot of data to analyze, but everything seems to point in that direction,” said Laura Bardi, a soil microbiologist at CREA whose team is studying the effects of rising temperatures and other environmental variables on kiwifruit trees.
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