It is still a matter of dispute whether it was the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés or Christopher Columbus who deserves credit for bringing the tomato from the New World back to the Old, but once transported the European tomato made itself at home. The earliest reference by an Italian herbalist, in 1544, referred to it as a “golden apple”; the French called tomatoes “love apples.” Mediterranean countries in particular had the sun, the soil and the skill to cultivate luscious fruits (yes, it is a fruit), and Italy, home of a thousand variations of tomato sauce, eventually became the largest producer of tomatoes on the Continent. Second is Spain, a country so smitten with tomatoes that the town of Buñol hosts the weeklong La Tomatina festival, complete with music, fireworks and an epic food fight in which more than 100 tons of overripe tomatoes are hurled in the streets. Tomatoes, as much as garlic and olives, were a southern European product. Up in the frosty north, on the other hand, tomatoes from the Netherlands used to be derided by the Germans as Wasserbomben (water bombs) as recently as the 1990s, so tough and flavorless were they.
But in recent years the European tomato landscape has changed dramatically. Now the Germans can’t get enough of Holland’s tomatoes. Even Spain, Italy and Greece import them. Holland, rather than any of the sunbaked lands hugging the Mediterranean, is now the largest exporter of tomatoes in Europe.
(PHOTOS: Spain’s Annual “Tomatina” Draws Thousands)
If you want to understand the transformation of Europe in the decade since the adoption of the single currency, you could do worse than to follow the journeys of a Dutch tomato and a Greek tomato in 2013. In sunny Greece, which produces almost twice as many tomatoes as the Netherlands, almost none of the squishy, delicious product makes it beyond the country’s borders, except in cans or as paste. That means that few people outside Greece are paying Greeks for a plentiful, potentially profitable crop — a missed opportunity that does nothing to help the debt-laden nation. And in summer months Greece imports Dutch tomatoes because Greek farmers haven’t yet figured out how to efficiently grow enough of the fruit during the hottest time of the year. That’s another missed opportunity for the go-nowhere Greek tomato. A Dutch tomato, by contrast, is a serious traveler: it can find itself picked, packed, shipped and displayed in the produce department of a Greek supermarket just days after sitting all cozy in a high-tech greenhouse on the flatlands of Holland. “I don’t understand why Greeks import so many tomatoes, especially from a sunless place like the Netherlands,” says Constantinos Akoumianakis, an assistant professor at the Agricultural University of Athens, “when we have the capability to grow enough tomatoes to cover our needs and export to others as well.”
But the Greeks aren’t the only tomato-growing giants who find themselves looking north with a mixture of frustration and admiration at the marvel that is the Dutch tomato business. The Spaniards are doing what the Greeks have, by and large, not done: they are trying to become more Dutch, scrambling to learn all they can from Dutch growers. In the process, they’re also helping to level out the huge imbalances in efficiency and trade that exist inside the euro zone and that have proved to be such, in hindsight, obvious flaws in the grand European economic and political experiment. Tomatoes are hardly the linchpin of the European economy — but because they are grown in many different European countries they do a nice job of highlighting problems and trends that are common to different industries, trades and businesses inside an economic bloc whose founders envisioned that strength, rather than the current weakness, would come from tying Europe’s economies together. If the south’s tomato growers can become genuinely Dutch, then perhaps, at last, it will be a sign that the vision of a fully efficient European economy might be on its way to becoming reality.
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Dutch Courage
In Italy and Greece, tomato farmers mostly grow their crop out in the open or in simple, unheated greenhouses that allow them to control how much water and fertilizer each plant gets. The drawback of this method is that for most farmers there are at best two crops per year rather than year-round production. There can also be problems with pests and humidity. And when the weather doesn’t play along, the harvest is poor.
The Dutch way is different. It’s a high-tech evolution of techniques invented by Dutch growers generations ago to raise plants and flowers despite often hostile weather. Jos van Mil, 49, co-founder with his brother-in-law of a company called Greenco, is a third-generation grower who specializes in baby plum tomatoes — “the best healthy candy for kids,” he calls them. Outside, the flat plains of Holland’s Westland region, the ground zero of Dutch tomatoes, are covered in a thick white crust of snow. But sitting inside one of his perfectly heated greenhouses, van Mil is unfazed. “I like this weather,” he says. “There’s a bit of sun. It’s better than when there’s no light.”
Van Mil’s grandfather Joop, who started growing tomatoes in the 1930s, set up each of his eight sons with a piece of land and a primitive greenhouse. At first, the van Mil sons grew cucumbers, salads and crops that do well in colder climates. But the postwar years saw rising wages and more sophisticated growing techniques. By the 1990s, farmers in Holland were starting to hook computers up in their greenhouses, while their rivals in Spain and Italy were still getting their hands dirty the old-fashioned way. The computers control temperature, humidity and carbon-dioxide levels in the greenhouses, helping to create ideal growing conditions.
Visit van Mil’s greenhouses now, and you enter a world that is part farm, part mission control. They are soaring edifices, 9 m tall, with rows of long tables on which the plants are grown. The temperature is toasty, but not unpleasantly so, and the place is bright, thanks not just to the glass but also to rows of halogen lamps that hang above the tables. Dutch tomatoes aren’t planted in soil, but in growing beds made from a substrate called mineral wool that looks like cotton candy and is spun out of basalt rock and chalk. The beds let growers control the precise dosage of water and nutrients. The difference in productivity between the Netherlands and countries to the south is stunning. A Dutch grower can get up to 70 kg of tomatoes out of each square meter of his greenhouse. A Mediterranean grower is lucky if he gets 7 kg. The Dutch have even found a way to turn the weather to their advantage. Mediterranean countries ordinarily have two crops per year — one in the winter-spring and one in autumn — but in the summer it’s too hot in southern Europe to grow tomatoes under plastic, so production is erratic. That’s nature’s way, and there’s little the Mediterranean countries can do about it other than switching to fully climate-controlled — and expensive — computerized greenhouses. In Greece, over the past five years, some growers have started investing in Dutch technology, including one $30 million project called Wonderplant in northern Greece. But these remain the exception; sophisticated glasshouses account for just 1.6% of the area given over to produce grown under cover, and that in itself is just a fraction of the fruit and vegetables, including tomatoes, grown out in the open.
Using artificial lighting in greenhouses, some Dutch growers are now able to produce more or less year round. Plus, the Dutch have been quick to exploit the consumer demand for produce grown without the use of pesticides. Unlike growers in the U.S. and elsewhere, who may soak their crops with dozens of different types of pesticides, the Dutch typically use none. To fight off pests like the whitefly, van Mil uses other bugs that are natural predators. Such “integrated pest management” is not only more environmentally friendly, it is all but required by choosy consumers in Germany, the U.K. and elsewhere.
(MORE: Study Links Food Allergies To Pesticides In Tap Water)
Once upon a time, Dutch growers sent their tomatoes to daily auctions, which retailers disliked because they could not buy in bulk. In 1996, all that changed: the auction houses merged and an integrated trading company was formed called The Greenery, which works closely with the top supermarket chains throughout Europe and with suppliers around the world. The supermarkets get to make huge and simplified orders of tomatoes (and other produce). Farmers like van Mil get to sell their produce en masse. Neither Greece, Italy nor Spain have anything like the same degree of logistics to support their tomato exports.
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Single Market
Once the continent was united by a single currency in 2002, competitors lost a powerful market weapon: the ability to control prices for their produce. When Greece, Spain and Italy still had their own currencies, they could devalue them to make their exports more attractive to foreign consumers. Their tomatoes — and handbags, T-shirts and porcelain — could, overnight, become cheaper. That option no longer exists, and was not ideal anyway. It made the Dutch even more efficient as they sought to compete, whereas the Mediterranean countries had no incentive to invest. So the only road back for these southern countries is cutting costs, embracing technology and raising productivity a little closer to Dutch levels.
But that won’t be easy. Van Mil now sells 150 tons of tomatoes per week, mainly in Europe. He only picks his tomatoes when a supermarket has placed an order, and he’ll package them using the store’s own branding. At the back of his greenhouse are 13 lines of packing machines that plop the tomatoes in plastic cartons marked with the imprint of supermarkets in Finland, Germany and Slovakia. That saves time at the other end; the supermarkets just need to slap on a bar code and a price sticker. Roughly a quarter of Dutch exports are actually re-exports; van Mil works with a partner grower in Spain, and as needed he will move truckloads of tomatoes up from Spain, and then add them to his supply chain to meet demand.
(PHOTOS: Spain’s Madcap Tomato Festival, “La Tomatina”)
Critically, the tomatoes themselves are different from the green, watery ones of the Wasserbomben days of the early 1990s, when sales slumped after consumers rebelled. Dutch growers diversified away from the loose, round tomato that had been their main crop, and which they had picked before the fruit was ripe. In came more varieties and a focus on picking at the last minute to ensure maximum taste. Are they as delicious as a freshly picked Cretan tomato? Perhaps not, but the big rise in sales suggests consumers like them again.
Contaminated
In the 1960s, when natural gas was discovered in the Netherlands, it threw the entire national economy off balance. Giddy with the sudden windfall, employers raised wages, manufacturers raised prices, but productivity did not keep pace and Dutch industry lost its competitive edge. Among economists, this came to be known as “Dutch disease.” These days the Dutch do not suffer from Dutch disease — but the Greeks do.
The adoption of the single currency in 2002 — the all-important external factor — enabled Greeks to borrow money at much lower rates than they could before, when they still had the drachma. Along with the cheap credit came a continuing inflow of E.U. subsidies. Greeks suddenly had more money to spend. That pushed up demand, which pushed up prices and wages. Which was, for a while, wonderful for individual Greeks but bad, in the long term, for Greece. “Suddenly industries can no longer compete,” says Ulrich Blum, an economics professor at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. “The Greeks used to have factories that made shoes and textiles and furs, but they’ve gone bust.”
Greek agriculture has been particularly hard hit. Productivity is 44% below the European average, and labor costs almost doubled, compared with just a 3% rise in Germany, where unions agreed to very low pay increases. So look at what happens to tomatoes: the acreage given over to them in Greece is over 10 times greater than in the Netherlands, but the Greeks export almost no fresh tomatoes. Since the introduction of the euro, production has actually been declining, while prices have been going up.
Giannis Karagiannis, an economist at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece, who specializes in agriculture, acknowledges that productivity is low but also blames tight-knit oligopolies that control distribution. These middlemen pay farmers low prices and take a big markup on tomatoes even as they have failed to put in place a more efficient distribution system, including for exports. “We have to make the market work,” Karagiannis insists.
(MORE: See Why the Rise of Greece’s Golden Dawn Party Is Bad for Europe)
Playing Ketchup
If Greece ever hopes to start exporting its tomatoes in significant numbers and use its plentiful crop to help it fight back economically, it would do well to look not just to the north to Holland but to the west too, to Spain.
Driven by the fear of having their livelihoods wiped out by Dutch farmers, Spanish growers have worked to improve their logistics, including supplying directly to supermarket chains around Europe. Some have adopted Dutch greenhouse techniques and in some cases are partnering up with Dutch growers, including van Mil. His Spanish suppliers use Dutch-style substrate beds and greenhouses with heating and biological pest control, just like he does at home. When the tomatoes are ripe, they are driven up by truck to Westland for packaging and distribution.
But the Spanish will need to keep improving their techniques to stay ahead of the Turks, Egyptians and Moroccans, who are producing ever more efficiently at lower cost than the Spanish. Andrés Góngora, a Spanish tomato farmer who is also the national representative for fruits and vegetables of the main agricultural union COAG, has a sense of déjà vu. “We’re back in a situation like we were in the ’80s. Exports are on the rise again, and what matters to the Spanish consumer is price above all else.”
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The Dutch competitive advantage isn’t set in stone. Productivity has gone up impressively, but because there are so many tomato-growing countries, Holland will need to fight to stay on top. If the Greeks can import more Dutch technology and make use of the country’s abundant sunshine, it’s possible that they could eventually stage a tomato comeback. And then, perhaps, Europe’s economic playing fields might level off a little and start to look more like the flat, productive plains of Westland.
— with reporting by Lisa Abend / Madrid, Ollie John, Kharunya Paramaguru and Sorcha Pollak / London and Joanna Kakissis / Athens
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