Thousands of Hectares of Olive Trees Burned to Ashes Across Southern Turkey

Summary

Wildfires burned more than 160,000 hectares in south­ern and south­west­ern Turkey, killing at least nine peo­ple and destroy­ing prop­erty and agri­cul­tural land, includ­ing thou­sands of olive trees. Olive farm­ers are call­ing on the gov­ern­ment for help to replant and rebuild, with con­cerns that cli­mate change will lead to more fre­quent and severe fire sea­sons in Turkey.

The wild­fires that raged across south­ern and south­west­ern Turkey burned more than 160,000 hectares from the end of July through mid-August.

Nearly 300 fires burned across five provinces over that time span, killing at least nine peo­ple and destroy­ing prop­erty and agri­cul­tural land.

Local olive farm­ers told Olive Oil Times that thou­sands of hectares of olive groves were engulfed by the fires with hun­dreds of thou­sands of olive trees destroyed in the process.

“It is pre­dicted that the olive groves cov­er­ing 1,500 to 2,000 hectares were dam­aged in the fires in Muğla,” Hatice Aktürk, the owner of Ata Ağaç Olive Oil, told Olive Oil Times. ​“This amount cor­re­sponds to approx­i­mately two per­cent of the olive groves and approx­i­mately 300,000 olive trees in Muğla province.”

Aktürk’s olive groves are located in the dis­trict of Milas, which bore the brunt of the fires in the province. Dozens of her cen­te­nary trees were lost dur­ing the blazes.

“In one of our groves in Milas, 25 of our old olive trees aged between 500 and 800 years all burned to ashes,” she said. ​“Around 0.4 hectares of our groves were affected.”

“For more than 15 days there were 288 wild­fires in Turkey, just like in many other Mediterranean coun­tries,” Aktürk added. ​“Here the tem­per­a­ture is more than 45 ºC, the humid­ity is too low and it was too windy.”

The com­bi­na­tion of dry heat and high winds helped kin­dle the fires and allowed them to spread rapidly through the Turkish coun­try­side, accord­ing to Pelin Omuroğlu, the co-owner of Ayerya Wind Valley Farm and founder of Olivurla.

“The wind was very strong some days which made things more and more dif­fi­cult,” she told Olive Oil Times.

Omuroğlu is con­cerned that these types of fire sea­sons will become more com­mon in Turkey as a result of cli­mate change. While any sin­gle event is dif­fi­cult to directly link to cli­mate change, most sci­en­tists agree that the con­di­tions that allowed for the fires to start and spread so quickly will become increas­ingly com­mon.

“As the cli­mate changes, it will get even hot­ter, and the fires will grow,” Bahar Alan, the owner of Nova Vera and one of Turkey’s most suc­cess­ful olive oil pro­duc­ers, told Olive Oil Times. ​“We should be more alert of com­pounded cli­mate events and their mul­ti­plier effects because there will always be a risk of new fires.”

“The wild­fires in Turkey are the worst of their kind in at least a decade,” she added. ​“The worst wild­fires in liv­ing mem­ory along its south­ern coast have deliv­ered a fresh blow to the sec­tor which makes up some five per­cent of the Turkish econ­omy.”

Olive farm­ers from across the affected regions are now call­ing on the Turkish gov­ern­ment to help them replant and rebuild.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has already promised to take mea­sures against the drought and plant 252 mil­lion trees in the coun­try to help pre­vent deser­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Mahmut Serdar Kocadon, the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Bodrum, said that olive grow­ers will be pro­vided with new trees to com­pen­sate for the dam­age to their groves.

However, many pro­duc­ers believe that these mea­sures are too lit­tle too late, and the gov­ern­ment largely let them down dur­ing the cri­sis.

Omuroğlu said she was not sat­is­fied with the government’s han­dling of the fires, accus­ing the author­i­ties of wait­ing too long before inter­ven­ing. She said that local vol­un­teers had been mostly respon­si­ble for fight­ing the fires and the gov­ern­ment had not become involved until inter­na­tional aid arrived.

Alan sug­gested that the gov­ern­ment limit the pub­lic use of forests, espe­cially dur­ing fire sea­son. She urged the gov­ern­ment to take lessons from the recent wild­fires.

“In times of fire, local gov­ern­ments espe­cially should be on the alert,” she said. ​“Especially con­cern­ing global warm­ing, all seg­ments of soci­ety should be made aware of it.”

However, Aktürk said that point­ing fin­gers will do affected grow­ers no good and that every­one must work together to rebuild after the blazes and help pre­vent future ones.

“Our groves are located in a small vil­lage, so our head­man [fore­man] acted very quickly with vol­un­teers,” she said. ​“When we arrived at our grove, all the peo­ple liv­ing around with head­man and fire­men had already man­aged the wild­fire.”

“Fires, whether caused by human error, [arson] or global warm­ing have deeply affected Turkey,” Aktürk con­cluded. ​“People need to treat nature, land and water more respect­fully.”