The Threat Of Olive Ebola

On Thursday, the co-operative Camp Mallorquí will be holding a conference in Palma. It will address issues such as technological innovation in agriculture, commercial opportunities and the future of farming co-operatives. But these will not be agricultural issues in general. There is one theme to the conference: almonds.

A further issue that will be discussed will be diseases and pests, and it is this issue which is by far the most pressing on the agenda. Almond trees are under renewed danger. So are olive trees. The danger comes in the form of a bacterium called "xylella fastidiosa".

Of American origin, this has already started to have a devastating effect on olive and almond trees in Italy and has now spread to France. Some 100,000 hectares of tree crops in Italy have been affected. There is no remedy other than to cut trees down and burn them in the hope of stopping the bacterium spreading. Which is a big hope. The bacterium is transmitted by leafhopping insects, which are extremely common.

So damaging has the bacterium been that it has acquired a deadly name - "olive ebola". It has not been detected in Mallorca, but farmers are naturally fearful that it might be. The consequences of it arriving on the island and taking hold could be enormous in terms of the island's economy and landscape. Its potential harm would greatly exceed that of the attacks on pines by processionary caterpillars or on palm trees by the "picudo rojo", the red beetle.

It poses a threat that is reminiscent of the phylloxera "plague" of the late nineteenth century. Mallorca had benefited greatly from the devastation of French vines by phylloxera earlier in that century. But when it arrived on Mallorca in the 1890s, the consequences for some rural areas of the island were catastrophic. Though it has since been argued that phylloxera was not as damaging as had been thought, there is no arguing the fact that it contributed to emigration and to a major shift in agricultural production. The vines were to return, but it is fair to say that the Mallorcan wine economy, a staple for so many centuries, didn't truly start its recovery until the 1970s, though the Franco regime had to take some of the blame for this delay because of its one-time insistence on an equally catastrophic self-sufficiency economic policy which placed an emphasis on subsistence crops.

There is a certain similarity between phylloxera and xylella fastidiosa. The grape phylloxera insect sucks sap from and feeds off leaves and roots. The result can be a fungal infection. Xylella fastidiosa insects also suck sap and transmit the bacterium in the process. There is still no actual remedy for phylloxera, though it has been combated by introducing resistant rootstock which creates a type of sap that repels the insect. As yet, a similar means of combating xylella fastidiosa appears not to exist.

At present, there is no formalised system of control against xylella fastidiosa, but the farming community wants controls of imported trees and of nurseries to be stepped up. A positive bit of news is that olive trees are typically imported from Andalusia where there is no evidence of the bacterium but also where the alert was first raised: the government in Andalusia, which has tightened its controls, was the one to let the rest of Spain know about the potential harm.

So, the threat, for the moment, is a hypothetical one, but as was seen with the palm beetle, it was public administration inertia that helped its diffusion. Before it truly took hold in Pollensa (where it is commonly said to have first been detected), attention was being drawn to an infection of palm trees. If local authorities had acted more swiftly, the loss of the island's palms would not now be as great as it is. At least, though, the threat is known about this time and it is one that would have greater economic consequence than the beetle. There are almost 25,000 hectares dedicated to almond production and a further 8,000 or so to olives, approximately a quarter of these for oil that has a protected designation of origin - the highly prized Mallorcan olive oil.

But there would be another consequence. Though the volume of farming land devoted to almonds has decreased significantly from what it once was, it has now stabilised, and it is almond production which gives Mallorca one of its most characteristic landscape features - the blossom of late winter. If this were to be threatened, if this were to disappear, there would be a loss very much greater than a mere economic one. And, unfortunately, there is more. It isn't just olive and almond trees that can be affected. So too can oleander and citrus trees, meaning lemon and orange groves. Just hope to God the bacterium stays away.

The Tourism Benefits Of Football

The chairmen of Leicester City and Burnley football clubs will be very happy Thai and Lancastrian gentlemen. Thanks to the new television deal, they can look forward to their clubs receiving untold fortunes in the Premier League next season. Of relegated sides from the Premier, the comedy gold that is the Cardiff City boardroom risks turning to dross despite the parachute payments.

We are familiar enough with the financial imperatives of Premier League football to the teams which inhabit it. In Spain, though the finances are different (the rich - Real Madrid and Barcelona - get absurdly rich, while the others make do), there are similar imperatives. At Real Mallorca they are only too well aware of them, but while the club's woes have been well chronicled, the fall into the Segunda was and is only part of them. The fall could be very much further.

While the football focus is on club finances, what of the wider economy in towns and cities with football clubs? What are the economic profits and losses from tourism of a team being in the premier division or in the second?

I am unaware of there having been a study of the economic impact of Real Mallorca's relegation. If there is to be one, it will probably have to come from the Balearics Chamber of Commerce, which would be following the lead of Chambers of Commerce in other parts of Spain that have sought to put numbers on the impact of promotion if not relegation. And one of the more thorough studies has been that involving Real Zaragoza.

Promoted at the end of the 2008-2009 season, Zaragoza went down again, along with Mallorca, last season. In anticipating the 2009-2010 season, the local Chamber of Commerce examined the benefits of promotion by assessing those that had been derived from the season before relegation (2007-2008). It was a highly detailed examination, and one that threw up some revealing statistics. There was a calculation of the total number of fans (of other teams), of away team members and personnel, of media people and of referees and linesmen. The number of fans was 14,707, an average of 774 per match. Away support for Spanish football teams is considerably lower than in England, and by way of comparison, the average number of away fans for matches in the Championship (equivalent to the Segunda) in 2012-2013 was 1,323, almost double, therefore, the away support for a Zaragoza La Liga match.

The distance that has to be travelled is the principal reason for lower away support, but unlike in England, where an away fan would typically not stay overnight, in Zaragoza a half of the away fans did. It is the overnight stays of fans, teams, press and referees, their spend on hotels, restaurants and other services that are at the heart of the calculation of economic benefit. In total, it was reckoned to have amounted to over 20.5 million euros in the 2007-2008 season.

Another study, that for Murcia, which was promoted in 2007, shows that the general economic benefit was over ten million euros. One for Granada has revealed that the local economy benefits by 28 million euros from promotion.

A professor at the University of Oviedo, Plácido Rodríguez, has done a fair amount of research into the effects of clubs' relegation and promotion on their local economies, but he admits that it is difficult to calculate the effects of relegation. I'm not sure why. If studies can place numbers on the positive impact of promotion, surely the same methodologies can apply in the case of relegation. The professor says that there haven't been "exhaustive studies" into the effects of relegation, and this has led to rather misleading reports. The losses from relegation, e.g. in Zaragoza and Murcia, are reported as being the same as the gains from promotion, when they clearly can't be. Apart from anyone else, there are still the referees and the teams.

Quite obviously though, there is a loss because of relegation, and one indirect way is through the promotion of the town or city. The study into Zaragoza's promotion highlighted the fact that mere presence in the top division exposes the city to greater recognition nationally and internationally and that this leads to more general tourism. The study put a value of 5.5 million euros on this aspect alone.

Whether Real Mallorca's descent into the Segunda has a negative impact in this regard is impossible to say. Nonetheless, there is much to be said for premier league presence acting as a means of indirect tourism promotion. For example, of all those new Chinese tourists who are coming to Spain, a goodly number know all about Madrid and Barcelona because of football. It may only be football, but perhaps rather more attention should be being paid to Mallorca's parlous situation. Back in the top flight, and there is a nice little means of tourism promotion.

The New Route To Cycling

Cycling tourism in Majorca is nothing new but it has undergone a significant boom in recent years. The hoteliers' federation calculates that it now generates an economic impact to the tune of sixty million euros per annum. But how does this 60 million stack up against the total economic impact of tourism? It is hard to be exact, because it is hard to know that like is being measured with like, but in 2011 the federation produced a report which estimated that the total impact was 9,090 million euros. 60 million, if one's being honest, is chicken feed in the overall scheme of things.

But overall scheme of things is what matters. Tourism is far from being standardised, either in terms of tourists themselves or the type of tourism in which they engage. Small the contribution may be, but the cycling niche, thanks to its boom, is finally realising benefits, and they most obviously manifest themselves in hotels opening earlier and more hotels opening earlier than has been the case. It is cycling and sports tourism in general which has prompted an increase in hotel openings this winter in Alcúdia. A total of thirty hotels will open between this month and April, seven more than last year, while in February alone, seven will have opened by the end of the month, which will be two more than 2013. The increases may not be huge but they are increases nevertheless.

A factor which may result in further early hotel opening over the next few years will be the grand cycling route which is to be created along the bay of Alcúdia. It has been promised for at least a decade but only now is going to come into being. One reason why it has been held back has been coming to an agreement as to precisely how to cope with the road that runs by the side of the Albufera nature park from the English bridge in Playa de Muro to Can Picafort. How this will be coped with has still to be explained, as Muro town hall, responsible for this section of the route (along presumably with the Council of Majorca, which has overall responsibility for the carreteras), has yet to present its design. Each of the three town halls involved - Alcúdia, Muro and Santa Margalida - will assume responsibility for layout of the route in their respective towns. At present, only Alcúdia has firmed up its ideas, which will see the route run from the coastal road coming from Puerto Pollensa, up to the Magic Roundabout and then along the Carretera Artà towards Playa de Muro.

The route will cost some 600,000 euros, and the finance will come from the regional government. The three town halls are also expected to apportion finance for the route from their 2014 budgets. All being well, and once Muro and Santa Margalida have finalised their designs, work could start on the route later this year. It is all pretty good news, it must be said.

Just going back to the economic impact of tourism and the report that the hoteliers' federation issued in 2011, it is interesting to see the marked difference between Pollensa and the bay of Alcúdia resorts. The economic impact was measured in terms of hotel activity and not total tourism activity, and so the difference highlights - not the first time - quite how small Pollensa's hotel tourism is by comparison with its neighbours. Alcúdia, perhaps surprisingly as it is the biggest of the resorts, didn't generate the most impact; Playa de Muro with 790 million beat Alcúdia's 748 million, an indication of the generally higher quality of Playa de Muro's hotels. Can Picafort generated 443 million, while Pollensa raised only 209 million.

Pollensa's performance is most definitely not a reflection of low quality hotels. Rather, it is reflection of the fact that the town does not have anything like the number of hotels as, say, Alcúdia does. It is also a reflection of just how important non-hotel accommodation, i.e. holiday lets (of different types) is to Pollensa's tourism economy.

For the record, the resort in Majorca which generated the highest economic impact was Playa de Palma - 1,665 million. Palmanova-Magalluf came second with 999 million.