Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and past

By Stefano Bernabei and Gavin Jones

ROME (Reuters) – International warming, drought and plant illness pose a rising menace to agriculture in Italy’s arid south, however a startup based by a former telecoms supervisor believes it has discovered an answer: Opuntia Ficus, higher referred to as the cactus pear.

Andrea Ortenzi noticed the plant’s potential 20 years in the past when working for Telecom Italia (BIT:TLIT) in Brazil, the place it’s extensively used as animal feed. On returning to Italy he started methods to show his instinct right into a enterprise alternative.

He and 4 buddies based their firm, known as Wakonda, in 2021, and started shopping for land to plant the crop within the southern Puglia area the place the historically dominant olive timber had been ravaged by an insect-borne illness known as Xylella.

The injury from the plant illness has been compounded by recurring droughts and excessive climate in the previous couple of years throughout Italy’s southern mainland and islands, hitting crops from grapes to citrus fruits.

Ortenzi is satisfied the hardy and versatile cactus pear, in any other case known as the prickly pear or, in Italy, the Indian fig, is usually a extremely worthwhile answer yielding a raft of merchandise resembling comfortable drinks, flour, animal feed and biofuel.

The Italian businessman is much from alone in seeing the potential of the plant, whose cultivation is increasing in scorching and dry areas around the globe.

“As an business, cactus pear manufacturing is rising moderately shortly, particularly for fodder use and as a supply of biofuel,” stated Makiko Taguchi, agricultural officer on the United Nations’ Meals and Agriculture Organisation headquartered in Rome.

MULTIPLE USES

The cactus produces a tasty fruit eaten in a lot of Latin America and the Mediterranean, whereas in Mexico the flat inexperienced pads that type the arms of the cactus, are utilized in cooking.

In Tunisia, the place it covers round 12% of cultivated land, second solely to olive timber, the cactus pear is a serious supply of revenue for hundreds, significantly ladies who harvest and promote the fruit.

In Brazil, which has the world’s largest manufacturing, it’s primarily cultivated within the north-east for fodder, whereas Peru and Chile use it to extract a pink dye referred to as Cochineal, utilized in meals and beauty manufacturing.

Sportswear group Adidas (OTC:ADDYY) and carmaker Toyota (NYSE:TM) have just lately proven curiosity in utilizing the cactus to provide plant-based leather-based sourced primarily from Mexico.

The cactus pear just isn’t but included within the FAO’s agricultural output statistics, however Taguchi cited the speedy growth of CactusNet, a contact community of cactus researchers and companies worldwide which she coordinates.

The FAO launched the group on-line in 2015 with 69 members. It now has 933 members in 82 nations.

The plant, native to abandon areas of south and north America, thrives within the more and more arid circumstances of Italy’s south, and desires ten instances much less water than maize, a comparable crop whose byproducts additionally embrace animal feed and methane.

Up to now Wakonda, an American Indian phrase which means nature’s omnipresent inventive power, has planted simply 10 hectares of cactus with 40,000 vegetation per hectare, however Ortenzi plans to plant 300 hectares by the tip of 2025, and he’s considering large.

Of the roughly 100,000 hectares of olive timber destroyed by Xylella in southern Puglia, solely 30,000 shall be replanted in the identical manner, he informed Reuters in an interview.

“Probably 70,000 might be planted with prickly pears,” he stated.

In the long term the probabilities might be even better, Ortenzi stated, contemplating greater than one million hectares of arable land have been deserted in Italy in current a long time as local weather change has made it harder to provide conventional crops.

WAKONDA’S MODEL

Wakonda’s enterprise mannequin discards the fruit and focuses as an alternative on the prickly pads, that are pressed to yield a juice used for a extremely nutritious, low-calorie vitality drink. The dried out pads are then processed to provide a lightweight flour for the meals business or a high-protein animal feed.

Wakonda’s round, ecological manufacturing system additionally contains “biodigester” tanks by which the waste from the output cycle is reworked into methane fuel used as a bio-fuel both on website or offered.

The corporate, which now has 37 shareholders, is in touch with mayors, corporations and universities to develop its merchandise.

Underneath Ortenzi’s marketing strategy, moderately than shopping for up land to plant the cactus, Wakonda goals to influence farmers of its potential after which licence out to them, in return for royalties, all of the tools and know-how required to take advantage of it.

“The land stays yours, you exchange it to prickly pears and I assure to purchase all of your output for not less than 15 years,” Ortenzi stated.