If Like Myself,

you like a cold kiwi fruit in the summer time,

this is a bit of bad news, morìa and nobody really knows what it is, is spreading in France, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Japan and China, but it seems to be moving at a much faster rate in Italy, the frightening thing is that no one knows what it is or how to stop it, photograph Utsman Media/Unsplash, scientists have been trying to figure out what is killing kiwi vines since the phenomenon was first observed in Verona, back in 2012. They looked at a variety of factors, from fungi and bacteria, to soil composition and oxygen levels, but they are no closer to finding answers than they were eight years ago, “It’s very difficult to study something like this,” Lorenzo Tosi, a researcher with research company Agrea, told The Guardian. “When we want to understand the cause of something, we try to isolate it and run an experiment. But that doesn’t work this time because several factors are in play […] Everything seems to contradict something else.” “This year, everything died,” Corrado Mazzi, a kiwi farmer from Verona, said. “You can try all you want but nothing changes, in two or three years, you are back to the start.”

Mazzi, and other kiwi farmers around Verona, tried everything in the last few years. He uprooted all his vines in 2015, and planted new ones in 2016 and 2018. He followed the best farming practices, but the morìa still came back, with so few answers at their disposal, scientist have begun speculating that global warming could be the main cause of this inexplicable kiwi die-off. Research has shown that the ideal temperature for growing kiwi is between 25C and 27C, but in recent years summer temperatures have shot up into the 30’sC.

There is also the extreme rainfall that can choke kiwi vine roots, but no such syndrome was recorded before 2012, so many are pointing the finger at climate change, “I still have a lot of data to analyse, but everything seems to point in that direction,” soil microbiologist Laura Bardi told The Guardian. “I’ve become convinced that climate change is the main factor; if we study this aspect in-depth, I think we’ll find the causes.” 8 years and still no idea if it is a fungi, bacteria or climate driven problem, that us a worry, not just for kiwi growers, but anyone that depends on growing crops for a living.