Historic Flooding in Southern Brazil Spares Mills and Olive Groves

Unprecedented rain­fall has dev­as­tated hun­dreds of towns and com­mu­ni­ties in Brazil’s south­ern­most state of Rio Grande do Sul, and author­i­ties fear more may be com­ing.

In the past month, Brazil’s most sig­nif­i­cant olive-grow­ing state has received 800 mil­lime­ters of rain, more than London gets annu­ally.

The rain has resulted in his­toric floods, with 157 peo­ple killed and 88 still miss­ing. A fur­ther 650,000 peo­ple have been dis­placed, more than a quar­ter of the state’s pop­u­la­tion.

Along with the human toll, the flood­ing has caused an esti­mated $2 bil­lion (€1.85 bil­lion) of dam­age and dis­rupted the state’s olive oil sales and ship­ping.

However, local pro­duc­ers con­firmed to Olive Oil Times that the flood­ing did not dis­rupt the har­vest, which con­cluded in April and did lim­ited dam­age to groves and mills.

“Olive groves are planted in high areas,” said Rafael Sittoni Goelzer, the mar­ket­ing rela­tions direc­tor of Viamão-based Estância das Oliveiras, sit­u­ated in a flood-affected area east of Porto Alegre.

“We do not have olive groves in Brazil in coastal or low-lying areas, so no orchard in the state had direct impacts from the floods,” he added. ​“The mills are located close to the plant­ing areas and are not impacted either.”

However, the award-win­ning pro­ducer added that logis­tics had been indef­i­nitely par­a­lyzed, mak­ing trans­port­ing the olive oil from the lat­est har­vest to super­mar­kets and spe­cialty food stores impos­si­ble.

“In addi­tion to hav­ing around 50 high­way points with block­ages, the only inter­na­tional air­port in the state is under water, with no expected return to oper­a­tion,” Goelzer said. ​“We are unable to trans­port our prod­ucts within the state, and we are hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties send­ing the oils to other states and coun­tries.”

Unable to sell his olive oil, Goelzer said the com­pany is focused on sup­port­ing res­cue efforts. He and his team are work­ing to col­lect food, water, cloth­ing and mat­tresses for some of the 76,000 peo­ple forced out of their homes.

Rafael Marchetti, the chief exec­u­tive of Prosperato, Brazil’s largest olive oil pro­ducer, con­firmed that sales have slowed as the state braces for fur­ther flood­ing with more rain in the fore­cast.

“We were about to start sell­ing the olive oil pro­duced from the lat­est har­vest,” Marchetti said. ​“We had every­thing pre­pared, and the day we were sched­uled to announce its release, the flood­ing began.”

“Our house got flooded, but we only had mate­r­ial losses. My fam­ily and I are all fine,” he added. ​“Porto Alegre and nearby cities are in chaos. The main high­ways are blocked, and our olive oil sales are prac­ti­cally frozen because trans­port com­pa­nies are unable to make the routes.”

At the onset of the heavy rain­fall, which began in the last week of April, Marchetti decided to wait a few days to see if the flood­ing would sub­side before releas­ing the lat­est harvest’s extra vir­gin olive oils.

However, the flood waters con­tin­ued to rise, and mete­o­rol­o­gists pre­dict that it could take more than a month for them to sub­side.

“It’s been [three] weeks, and the company’s sales are frozen, even from our local shop at the mill,” Marchetti said. While the store remains open, foot traf­fic has fallen sub­stan­tially.

Prosperato sells a large por­tion of its extra vir­gin olive oil in Porto Alegre and the rest of Rio Grande do Sul. The com­pany also sells in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro but has been unable to trans­port the oils there.

“The trans­port com­pa­nies can­not tell us when they will work again,” Marchetti said. ​“The main road to access Porto Alegre is still blocked.”

“All the cus­tomers know that things are going to take a longer time to get them,” he added. ​“They under­stand the sit­u­a­tion and are wait­ing for their orders to arrive.”

Since the com­pa­ny’s mill and groves are located at higher ele­va­tions, they were not dam­aged, and bot­tling, cap­ping and label­ing con­tinue.

“We are work­ing to be ready for the new har­vest and for when the sit­u­a­tion returns to nor­mal,” Marchetti said. However, some of the olive oil can­not be bot­tled because a ship­ment of caps did not arrive due to the flood­ing, which dam­aged the sup­pli­er’s ware­house.

Farther west in the state, the pro­duc­ers behind Lagar H are work­ing to rebuild the dam­aged infra­struc­ture sup­port­ing their olive grove and the local com­mu­nity.

The com­pa­ny’s olive groves are near Cachoeira do Sul, about 160 kilo­me­ters west of Porto Alegre on the Jacui River.

“We are very impacted by this tragedy,” said co-owner Glenda Haas. ​“Our entire fam­ily is from Rio Grande do Sul, and although per­son­ally, every­one is fine, it is very dif­fi­cult to see the pain and loss of so many peo­ple in a place that means so much to us.”

“Some employ­ees have had to leave their homes, but we are help­ing them with recon­struc­tion and pur­chas­ing nec­es­sary goods,” she added.

While the com­pa­ny’s olive groves were not harmed, Haas said the extreme rain­fall dam­aged some of their drainage and cul­verts, which take excess water away from the trees.

Like many of her col­leagues, Haas com­pleted the har­vest before the rain began and shipped her lat­est olive oil pro­duc­tion to dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters in São Paulo before the flood­ing started.

“We are cur­rently help­ing numer­ous insti­tu­tions and vol­un­tary move­ments with dona­tions of money or olive oil, in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing all the nec­es­sary sup­port to our employ­ees directly,” she said.

The nat­ural dis­as­ter comes after a poor har­vest in south­ern Brazil, pro­voked by pre­vi­ous rains that fell from September through December.

“By the time the olives were flow­er­ing dur­ing September, we had a lot of rain,” Marchetti said. This resulted in some blos­soms falling from the tree and fail­ing to become olives.

However, the con­tin­ued rain through­out November and December helped increase the oil yield in the remain­ing olives to lev­els sig­nif­i­cantly above aver­age.

Overall, Prosperato’s har­vest declined about 30 per­cent from pre­vi­ous years. Not all grow­ers were as lucky.

Along with olives from the company’s groves, Prosperato sources olives from about 20 other regional farm­ers. ​“Some other pro­duc­ers lost 90 or even 100 per­cent of their har­vest,” Marchetti said. ​“This year, we only bought olives from two of our usual part­ners.”

Marchetti lives in Guaíbo, a city near Porto Alegre on the west­ern shores of Guaíba Lake. As the lake began to rise, reach­ing a record-high 5.3 meters in some places, Marchetti left to stay with his sis­ter, who lives in the north of the state.

He plans to return and start rebuild­ing as soon as the waters sub­side but does not know what he will return to and how he will begin to rebuild, a feel­ing shared by many of the 2.2 mil­lion res­i­dents of Rio Grande do Sul.

“It’s been a night­mare. Nobody knows what to do next,” he con­cluded. ​“The gov­ern­ment doesn’t know what is going to hap­pen. There’s a sense in some areas that peo­ple don’t want to live there any­more.”

• Financial Times
• Mercopress