Prickly pear cultivation on the rise in Italy and elsewhere as heat hits traditional crops
In arid southern Italy, where drought, disease and global warming ravage olive trees, a start-up is growing prickly pear, a food and biofuel
Global warming, drought and plant disease pose a growing threat to agriculture in Italy’s arid south, but a start-up founded by a former telecoms manager believes it has found a solution: Opuntia ficus, better known as the prickly pear.
Andrea Ortenzi saw the plant’s potential 20 years ago when working for Telecom Italia in Brazil, where it is widely used as animal feed. On returning to Italy he began looking at ways to turn his intuition into a business opportunity.
He and four friends founded their company, called Wakonda, in 2021, and began buying land to plant the crop in the southern Puglia region, where the traditionally dominant olive trees had been ravaged by an insect-borne bacterial disease called Xylella fastidiosa.
The damage from the plant disease has been compounded by recurring droughts and extreme weather in the past few years all over Italy’s southern mainland and islands, hitting crops from grapes to citrus fruits.
Ortenzi is convinced the hardy and versatile prickly pear, otherwise called the cactus pear or, in Italy, the Indian fig, can be a highly profitable solution; it can be used to make soft drinks, flour, and animal feed and as a biofuel.
