When Blossom Falls: Mallorca’s almonds

February. In parts of Mallorca there is a familiar and pretty sight. Almond trees in blossom. The tourism they attract may not rival, say, the tulip fields of the Netherlands, but it does attract some. But for how much longer?

In the past five years, the amount of land devoted to almond cultivation has shrunk dramatically. A loss of 33,000 hectares has left the island with less than half the area for almond-growing that it had in 2005; 25,000 hectares remain.

The decline can be attributed not to crisis but to a change in productive agricultural land use. Where once were almond trees are now olive groves. The decline can be attributed also to factors of competition, consumption, markets and to the Common Agricultural Policy.

Almonds are only one example of a shift in agricultural production. One of the more dramatic has been the move to rice and away from potatoes. Less prone to the capriciousness of nature, rice has altered the pattern of agriculture in the traditional potato-growing area in and around Sa Pobla. Yet, the rice is primarily for domestic consumption, whereas the potatoes of Sa Pobla have long had a significant export market.

Export, however, has been highly influential in driving greater olive production. Indeed, most of Mallorca’s olive oil goes overseas. Prized for its quality, it has found new and large markets; China, for instance. Almonds, though also highly valued by these new markets, don’t represent the same opportunity, and this is in no small part due to the competition and the market dominance that comes from California.

In the late 1970s, the US overtook Spain as the leading producer of almonds, or rather California did. Some 80% of the world’s supply of almonds now comes from California. In a manner similar to that of the Californian wine region of the Napa Valley and its inroads into French supremacy in the global wine market, so agricultural technology, way in advance of Spanish methods, secured a position of dominance for the Californian almond from which Spain and Mallorca have never really recovered.

International competition is not confined to American almonds. Imports of other types of nut have altered Mallorcan and Spanish consumption, eroding the demand for the mainstays of Mallorcan nut production, hazelnuts as well as almonds.

Though Spanish production of almonds in 2011/2012 is due to rise by around 11% on a five-year average, this increase is largely down to natural factors; the harvest will have benefited from generally benign conditions. But the vagaries of nature have, as with the potato, occasionally taken their toll. In 2009, Mallorca’s almond production was poor by comparison with other parts of Spain, the result of too much rain and wind inhibiting pollination during the flowering season. And the almond faces another natural threat, in Mallorca and elsewhere: that of worries about the honeybee.

But over and above these different factors, successive reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) have probably been most influential.

CAP regulations have been both positive and negative. They brought about a general improvement in the quality of olive oil, but they also, thanks to subsidies and guaranteed minimum prices above world-market prices, brought about a boom in olive-tree plantation. Though the subsidy has changed since the 1980s, the growing of olives has continued to increase, and this despite the adoption of more environmentally sensitive policies in a 2005 reform.

The effects of this reform haven’t necessarily been that environmentally sensitive, notwithstanding CAP criteria that are meant to place environmental issues to the fore. Intensive olive plantations have taken over from what were more traditional crops and, in the process, have reduced biodiversity, and not just in Mallorca.

Allied to this has been a calculation in subsidy known as the coupled payment suppression and its impact on nuts. The outcome of this has been a 13% reduction on margins for Spanish nut farmers and pretty much Spanish nut farmers alone.

Agriculture is only a tiny part of Mallorca’s economy, just a bit over 1% of GDP, but it is being looked at anew for its potential growth. The appointment as environment and agriculture minister in the regional government of Gabriel Company, an independent from agriculture, highlights this renewed attention being given to agriculture. But which priorities are grabbing his attention?

While olive-oil production has clear economic advantages, the minister, in his combined role, will know that almonds, a faltering element in the agricultural mix, contribute also to the natural environment and landscape of Mallorca. And at the current rate of loss, by 2017 there will be no almond growing and no almond blossom.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Ice-Cream Man

The heat of a Mallorcan summer’s afternoon. A refreshing beer perhaps? A can of chilled over-priced Coke from a beach-side supermarket? Or what about a lolly?

There can be little finer than some fruity ice with which to quench a thirst; the sweet taste of orange concentrate being sucked to the point where its colour disappears, leaving a spear of silvery frost. The lolly is a greatly underrated pleasure, inclined to be overlooked in favour of more exotic packaging to be picked over in a shop’s freezer, the chill from which, on sweaty hands and forearms, is worth the price of what’s to eventually be chosen: the Magnum; the one in a tub with a Venetian twirl and a suggestion of cherry; the variety of white chocolate coating, dark chocolate, chocolate with nuts. Ice cream.

The lolly is, suprisingly perhaps, a relatively recent innovation. It is little more than a hundred years old. It is a johnny-come-lately of the world of things on a stick. The ice cream has an altogether longer history, yet both share a common bond, that of ice. That it took a couple of hundred years for someone to add fruit juice to ice when cream and ice had been being combined since the early eighteenth century is a curiosity of uninventiveness. (In fact the first lolly didn’t even involve fruit juice; it was made with soda water powder.)

The heritage of ice cream partly explains its dominance when it comes to the sunny-afternoon refreshment decision. The ice cream is firmly embedded in our collective consciousness. We have become instinctive ice-cream eaters. And the ice cream, because it has infinite versatility in a way that the lolly doesn’t, is a marketing man’s dream. We are attracted to its packaging, to its tubs of all colours, to its never-disappointing moreishness.

We grew up with lollies and ice cream, but the ice cream has stayed with us. The lolly, despite its greater thirst-quenching properties, is very much more infantile. Grown men are more likely to hide their lolly consumption than openly display it on the beaches or streets of Mallorca. The ice cream, on the other hand, holds no possible stigma. It is an accepted indulgence, a totally unguilty pleasure. One can be outed as an ice-cream eater without any thought of recrimination.

We all carry our ice-cream baggage with us, our own histories of ice cream. My own goes back to the ice-cream parlour in the village at the foot of the hill going up to the church. Fortuna’s Ice Cream. The very name was parodical. Mr. Fortuna was parodical. He was an Italian before Italian stereotyping had been thought of. And he made ice cream.

The strangest thing about Mr. Fortuna was that he was an uncle of mine, despite there being not the slightest Italian connection between our family and anyone else’s. He, Uncle Fortuna (we never actually knew his first name), was an uncle purely on account of the fact that every man back then was an uncle, just as every woman was an aunt. My childhood was full of confusion; I could never quite work out who I was actually related to.

To the Italians has fallen the honour of history in assigning to them responsibility for having invented certain foods and drink. Pizza, pasta, cappuccino, ice cream. Arguably, they didn’t invent any of them, and a claim on ice cream is the most tenuous. The problem is, however, that the history of ice cream is not exact. The English have as much right to be named as the inventors of the modern ice cream as anyone else. But so also do the Mallorcans.

Where common ground appears to exist in the arcane world of ice-cream historians and researchers is with regard to when the modern ice-cream era started: the early 1700s. Though there is no evidence as to actual ice-cream manufacture in Mallorca at that time, the wherewithal for its manufacture was taking shape, and it was in the form of what still exists today, the Can Joan de s’Aigo chocolate parlour in Palma, and in particular something you wouldn’t immediately associate with Mallorca – ice. Sr. de s’Aigo used to gather snow from the Tramuntana and store it, while a growth in almond plantations in the eighteenth century was what was to lead to the Can Joan ice cream. Almond milk met mountain snow, and the rest was ice-cream history.

Amidst the Häagen Dazs, the Ben and Jerry and the Magnum, almond ice cream assumes pride of place in the freezers of Mallorca. Along with other flavours, it is churned out by the “gelats” and “helados” of the island. Ice cream passes from generation to generation, the children’s parties at fiesta time concluded with the handing out of free ice cream for all. And so the tradition is perpetuated. The ice-cream tradition. Pity the poor lolly.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.