Months before the harvest began in November, Greek olive oil farmer Michalis Antonopoulos knew it would not be a good year. First, his trees did not fully blossom because last winter was not cold and wet enough. In the spring, temperatures soared to 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit), damaging the flowers that were to grow into olives. Then the summer brought the worst heat wave in decades, drying up the olives and setting off wildfires that torched hundreds of thousands of trees. Standing in his grove in Kalamata, Greece's best-known olive producing region, among trees that are hundreds of years old, Antonopoulos pointed to the results: half empty branches, with small or shriveled olives, or rotting, attacked by a fruit fly. "We're witnessing phenomena and problems th...
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