Another week's gone by; I just do not know where time goes. It seems that doing little or nothing has increased the speed of time rather than slowed it down as it did in our prime. We have many garden tasks to do between New Year and March, mostly regarding pruning. Some of which I am able to do, like pruning roses and small fruit shrubs while pruning tall shrubs and fruit trees, are beyond me now. The most difficult are the cherry and peach trees. The citrus is easy, as are the almonds and mulberries, which Rozanne and I can handle. We have just harvested the remainder of last year's oranges. You may be surprised to hear much of the citrus fruit in the villages around us is left to drop on the ground and rot. Most likely, it is unsuitable for the over-selective supermarket. At least the wild pigs benefit despite them being one of the major farming pests here. They especially like grapes as they ripen on the vine.
When we took over the house, the previous owner planted some invasive species, notably prickly pear, lantana, and yuccas. Yuccas we have got rid of while this year, we're making a concerted effort to eliminate the prickly pear and lantana. Funnily enough, lantana on mainland Portugal is not deemed obnoxious, while it is on Madeira and the Azores. Unfortunately, many of our neighbours, or should I say many Portuguese, have both in their gardens, as do expats who even at present actively propagate them. The prickly pear, as you will know, is attractive when flowering and when the fruit is ripe. So we, upon receiving requests for cuttings, decline and advise against them.
Up until COVID-19, the local vocational college for challenged young people, Cerci used to do much of this heavy work for a fee, but with COVID-19, they stopped doing outside work, and we subsequently reverted to the help of a long-distance driver, Sergio whose work was restricted by the pandemic. I must admit, in a way, when Cerci stopped, I was somewhat relieved as I had nightmares about what our liability would be if one of the youngsters, who would happily climb up our walnut or olive tree with a chainsaw, should fall or, worse, cut off a limb. No hard hats or safety harnesses. Portugal is not great at observing the rules, although we often see classes taking place in the area that demonstrates equipment use and safety for local farmers and contractors. Tractor deaths are also common due to tractors without roll bars on the plantation slopes. It seems like cars and seat belts, if old enough, roll bars are not required.
Sergio was happy to come during COVID-19 as his work time was restricted. His work is mostly cross-border, collecting fish from Northern Europe for the local frozen food factory, which specialises in fish, just down the road from our village. Someone can tell me where the logic is in having a fish-freezing factory in the middle of Portugal rather than in one of the many fishing ports or seaside villages. I suppose it is about EU grants to stimulate employment in rural areas.
I think Sergio is now really too busy driving to worry about our garden needs. Therefore, we restrict, or he restricts us, to a couple of days a year. I think he is too polite to say he cannot continue to do it, while we are too shy to look for alternatives as we do not wish to offend him. If we were fluent in Portuguese, it would be easier; for his part, he does not speak a word of English. If I bump into him in a local bar or restaurant, he will insist on buying me a beer. I would not like to lose this very pleasant, hard-working man’s friendship through offence.
This past weekend, he came in and cut all our cactus plants back, especially the prickly pears, from being ten-foot goliaths into ground-level stumps. As soon as I see growth, I will be out with the drill and applying tree herbicide directly into those stumps. I find the most success comes from drilling holes into the stump or the offending growing cactus plant and pouring in undiluted herbicide. It worked well with our fig tree, which was very productive, but as those who know fig trees, there is nothing worse than having ripe fallen figs adhering to your shoes. It is almost impossible to remove without a wire brush. Using a garden hose is futile. This meant every time I visited that area of the garden, I had to remove my shoes before entering the house, and there are no staff here to clean up after us on a daily basis. Anyway, we do not need fig trees as they grow in profusion all around us, and they are easy to gather by reaching from the public roads and paths. With Cerci, they used to remove our prunings, which were normally trailer loads, but now we rely on our neighbour, Augusto, with his ancient but immaculate MF240. It must be at least twenty-five years old as they stopped manufacturing them in 1999 but my gut feeling, requiring confirmation, is that this one in question is a 1980’s model. I look in wonder when well-serviced ancient tractors pass me with their smallholder owner drivers never travelling at more than fifteen kilometres an hour. We, as ex-farm owners in Zimbabwe, probably did not have the patience for this speed, nor our drivers, while cautioned daily on speeding, ignored any orders on restricting their speeds. The first thing we used to do on our tractors was to remove the foot throttle, something they loved to use in revving the tractor, especially during gear changes.
It was not uncommon for you as a commercial farmer to find a driver in the farmyard without his tractor informing you there was a small problem. That could be a tractor wrapped around a tree, a tractor split in two, or just having run out of fuel.
“We all learned while farming in Africa that an announcement by a tractor driver of a small problem was inevitably a very large problem.” - Peter McSporran
Sadly, on small farms in Portugal, especially grape and olive plantations, Western tractors have been replaced by a myriad of Chinese and Indian models. They do not bring me nostalgia, but every green, blue, or red tractor does.
Tunisia.
In September 1993, as we were entering a free market, it was decided that those commodities that were affected by international trade should attend the International Federation of Agricultural Producers in Istanbul, Turkey. I think we became members shortly after its President, John Cameron, opened our Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) congress sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. John was a canny Scotsman who was a large landholder in the Highlands of Scotland, where he had recently received some £850,000 in funding to protect an area for a butterfly which was under threat. Must be nice to get this sort of money to do nothing on hills where only a few sheep and cattle normally roam anyway, relying on subsidies for their survival. John was also a successful businessman; at that time, he was chairman of Scotrail, which used to function in those days. Our Director, David Hasluck, normally attended the executive meetings held a week before the main conference but it was decided he should remain at home supporting the listed farmers and, in his stead, myself and Stewart Cranswick should attend the pre-conference executive meeting to be held in Tunis, Tunisia. Mainly to try and get a better idea of how Zimbabwe could enter the international agricultural markets or even have a voice in it.
Tobacco, our main export, was not a member of IFAP, as many abhorred the idea of trading in it, let alone growing it, while horticulture also had not been formalised enough to be part of it. We did export cotton and beef along with maize in times of surplus but were more badly affected by cheap imports from the food mountains in Europe and the USA. So, while beef wanted access, dairy wanted cheap powdered milk, and butter stopped as it was affecting our local dairy industry, as did the poultry industry, which wanted restrictions on brown chicken meat from the Americas. The Americans have little use for the leg of chicken, only the breast, so the rest is dumped on the world market.
“Dumping was common in those days of subsidised food mountains. One favourite means of dumping was when food aid was required. Grain aid supplied from America not only had to come from that country but had to be shipped in American ships.” - Peter McSporran
As this was an executive meeting with many bureaucrats in attendance, we also came across diplomatic farmer snobbery with those with any connection to Brussels, the EU, preferring to use French over English on the periphery of the meeting at meals and in the bar. In the formal meetings themselves, we had instantaneous translation. We sort of felt like poor outcasts who were not exactly welcomed, although tolerated, despite John Cameron making pains to include us when he could.
At that time, Stewart and I knew little about international marketing, and it did not take us long to pick up the fact that the EU and the Americas wanted access to our markets but were not interested in Zimbabwe getting access to any of their own. They were most interested in stopping imports no matter where they came from if their country had production in the said commodity. With all else failing, they could fall back on phytosanitary barriers if tariffs were not high enough. Stewart and I did, however, get a far better understanding of the limitations of trade through ZIMACE, that being, it would initially only serve the local and regional markets. If nothing else, our volumes of grains and oilseeds were too small for the big players anyway. However, niche markets would be found for commodities such as premium beef, coffee, tea and, of course, horticulture, which was in its infancy in Zimbabwe at that time.
“In the early 1990s, free trade was the buzzword in agriculture globally. Global players seemed to consider this a one-way phenomenon, not something to be reciprocal.” - Peter McSporran
Neither Stewart nor I were impressed by the other delegates' self-interest presentation, the city of Tunis, or the hotel and its food. The last three days would be spent on a field trip to the irrigation schemes in the south of the country, which, in comparison, were extremely interesting and educational. That is for next week.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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