Stopping Xylella a 'Top Priority,' Greek Official Says

The Xylella Fastidiosa bac­terium has been haunt­ing olive oil grow­ers in Italy and other areas of the Mediterranean for some years now.

Greece remains unaf­fected by the dis­ease and recently, the deputy min­is­ter of Rural Development and Food, Vassilis Kokkalis, assessed the case of path­o­genic agents in plants and Xylella fas­tidiosa par­tic­u­larly.

During the sev­enth Regional Convention for the Reformation of Production that took place in Corfu, Kokkalis first stressed the impor­tance of strength­en­ing the con­trol mech­a­nisms in order to pre­vent cat­a­strophic agents from cross­ing the bor­der into Greece.

“In the era of con­tem­po­rary trade, plants, prop­a­ga­tion mate­r­ial, and agri­cul­tural prod­ucts from around the world arrive daily at our bor­der check points. It is cru­cial that the con­trol mech­a­nisms are prop­erly manned to act proac­tively and track path­o­genic agents before becom­ing dis­as­trous for our pri­mary sec­tor pro­duc­tion,” he said.

Kokkalis then focused on the Xylella bac­te­ria and set the bar high regard­ing cut­ting off the agent by stat­ing ​“Xylella Fastidiosa is an aggres­sive pathogen found in neigh­bor­ing Italy with no rem­edy yet avail­able, caus­ing thou­sands of olive trees to be cut down. The top pri­or­ity for the Ministry now is to pre­vent the pathogen from enter­ing the coun­try.”

No man­i­fes­ta­tion of the dis­ease has been doc­u­mented in Greece, despite an announce­ment made last July on air by Spyros Mamalis, head of the Geotechnical Chamber of Greece, that the bac­terium had infected trees in the Peloponnesus region.

Further exam­i­na­tion per­formed by spe­cial­ized lab­o­ra­to­ries deter­mined that Xylella was not the cul­prit for dam­age caused on the trees and that the announce­ment was false alarm. A con­se­quent press release by the Ministry of Rural Development con­firmed that no bac­te­ria of the Xylella fas­tidiosa pathogen had been detected and called for cau­tion and proper judge­ment to pre­vail.

But apart from Greece, Xylella fas­tidiosa is a top pri­or­ity for the European Union as a whole. In a high level meet­ing that was held in Paris last month, the EU Commissioner for Food Safety and Security Vytenis Andriukaitis and the Ministers of Agriculture from ten European coun­tries con­sid­ered to be directly threat­ened by the bac­terium (Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, France, Croatia, Malta, Portugal, Germany, and Slovenia) agreed on a road map to apply stricter mea­sures in order to con­tain it.

The roadmap includes mea­sures like knowl­edge improve­ment through the sup­port of research pro­grams, sur­veil­lance strength­en­ing for timely detec­tion, and rein­forc­ing aware­ness and infor­ma­tion actions.