Abstract

Over the past decade, thousands of centuries-old olive trees in the Southern Italian region of Apulia dried out and the whole olive farming sector have teetered on the brink. Despite having been framed, by the phytosanitary authorities, as an exclusively technical agricultural problem related to the spread of a biological threat – the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa – this article argues that other historical, cultural, economic and socio-ecological factors also contributed to the outbreak. It conceptualizes the ecological weakness of historically shaped monocultural landscapes of 'colonial' origin, the cultural practices associated with the production of lamp oil (olio lampante), the increasing market pressures brought by globalization, and the abandoning of 'good agronomic practices' as a consequence of broader rural out migration, as plant disease detonators that, over space and time, created the perfect playground for a bacterium to spread widely and to occupy the center of the political stage. Combining multispecies (auto)ethnography with qualitative interviews and historical analysis, and integrating insights from critical agrarian studies, political ecology and environmental humanities, this study outlines a more-than-human political ecology of the X. fastidiosa outbreak in Southern Italy and highlights the complex multi-species relations that have shaped, and continue to shape, olive farming practices and Apulian landscapes. In doing so, it informs and contributes to critical scholarship aiming at going beyond human-nonhuman dichotomies, while at the same time keeping political economy and structural considerations at center stage.

Keywords: Xylella fastidiosa, Olive Quick Decline Syndrome, more-than-human political ecology, multispecies studies, Anthropocene detonators, agrarian change

How to Cite:

Gatti, F., (2026) “Plant disease detonators: Lamp oil, agrarian change, and the historical-material making of the Xylella fastidiosa outbreak in southern Italy”, Journal of Political Ecology 33(1): 8341. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.8341