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Awful year for Italian chestnuts: production 80% lower

For Italian chestnut growers this is the worst year, ever. The long lasting drought combined with the deleterious effects of the gall wasp (a killer insect), making it more harmful than usual. This will lead to a tiny harvest, 80% lower on average, and entire areas with no harvest at all.

Beside the economic damage, amounting to millions of Euros, the current situation leads to fields being abandoned. This poses a severe wildfire threat.

The threat to the Italian chestnuts is the gall wasp, a parasite which comes from China. It has been damaging the plants for years, drastically reducing a production that, until 2007 was of about 50,000 tons. For years the numbers have been going down; -50% in 2010 and -70% in 2011.

This year the situation appears to be even worse. It is likely to be a season of losses for the 34,000 companies operating in this business, that between 1999 and 2007 generated revenues of 46 million Euro.