Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming

Abstract Over the past decade, the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa has profoundly transformed olive-growing landscapes in the southern Italian region of Apulia. Once characterized by ancient olive trees that sustained both rural livelihoods and cultural identities, the region is now caught between two competing trajectories: on the one hand, efforts to intensify and mechanize production to remain competitive in global olive oil markets; on the other hand, attempts to preserve centuries-old trees valued as cultural heritage and landscape elements. This paper conceptualizes this tension as a conservation dilemma: the structural conflict between sustaining olive trees simultaneously as livelihood-sustaining crops and as elements of biocultural landscapes. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and the analysis of disease management policies and practices, the paper extends debates on conservation politics into productive agroecosystems and brings the political ecology of conservation into closer dialogue with critical agrarian studies and political agroecology. By showing that competing strategies for “saving” the olive trees enact different visions of agricultural futures, each supported—or undermined—by specific subsidy schemes, market forces, and labor regimes, the paper argues that the fate of Apulian olive trees depends less on technical solutions to the disease than on the political and economic conditions that determine which practices of care can be materially sustained. The paper concludes by reflecting on convivial conservation and a conservation basic income as potential frameworks for sustaining labor-intensive landscape-care practices beyond market-based solutions.