Autumn heat/ drought “affecting avocados”

Environmentalists who have bemoaned the government’s insistence to keep giving the green-light to water intensive monocultures, like avocados, may draw some solace from the fact that the current high temperatures in the Algarve/ Alentejo are doing nothing for these crops. “The heat has been burning many of the avocados”, one grower has told Correio da Manhã, explaining this renders them “unsaleable”. Coupled with the drought “meaning we have to water more”, growers are faced with “more expenses and less revenue”. Avocado monocultures have always been a ‘disaster predicted’, in spite of authorities insistence in the early days that this was ‘the agriculture of the future’.