|
|
Change Your Life! |
Cork versus plastic |
|||||||
|
News
|
||||||||
August 30, 2000
AZARUJA, Portugal (AP) - The sun is just rising when the cork cutters set out across the pale, dusty earth, their axes and clay water jugs slung over their shoulders. Their boots clip ankle-length scrub as they duck beneath tree branches and swap oath-edged chatter in search of their prize: a cork oak ready for harvest. They work in pairs, one man clambering up the tree while the other stays on the ground. In unison they chop delicately into the dead bark, gauging its thickness by the sound resonating from the steel ax, and carve out slabs. The spongy cork peels like an orange, with a crackling, tearing sound, baring the tree's bright yellow, living layer of bark. Jose Manuel Salgueiro, 48, who has been cutting cork for 28 years, holds out his hands to show palms stained black from tannin. "It's a tough life, but the pay is good," he says. He earns 15,000 escudos - about dlrs 70 - a day, or double what an average Portuguese farmworker makes. For centuries cork has been a way of life, supporting entire families, towns and the economy of rural Alentejo province. In all, the cork industry provides work for 16,000 Portuguese. They produced 185,000 tons of cork - about 55 percent of world production - last year, earning dlrs 725 million on exports. But there may be a threat on the horizon: plastic stoppers.
Synthetic stoppers have so far nibbled only 1 percent of the annual world market for 13 billion stoppers, but people in the Portuguese cork business are worried about the future. British supermarkets have adopted plastic stoppers with enthusiasm, saying they avoid the occasional problem of "cork taint," when a cork spoils the wine. A shift to plastic could be devastating for Azaruja, a town of 2,000 people about 90 miles (145 kilometers) east of Lisbon. Almost all its inhabitants live from cork, which has brought the town a school, bank, post office and pharmacy while rural communities elsewhere in Portugal fade away as young people move to the cities. Azaruja has 19 factories where harvested cork is boiled, cut and graded before being sent to plants in northern Portugal where cork stoppers are produced. Cork also has less well-known uses, such as insulation on the space shuttle and beneath the keys of clarinets. Joao Ortigao Ramos, the 78-year-old owner of the 2,300-acre (920-hectare) Monte da Venda farm outside Azaruja, which has thousands of cork oaks, finds the prospect of plastic stoppers alarming. "We're very scared," Ortigao Ramos says at his early 18th century farmhouse where Spaniards came three centuries ago and taught his forebears how to profit from cork oak. "We're a small and poor country. If plastic takes off, it'll be a great danger for Portugal. It would be tragic, dramatic for our town, for this region, and for Portugal," he adds. The soil here is poor, and Ortigao Ramos shrugs helplessly when asked what people would do without the cork industry. The cork oak is part of the Alentejo's signature landscape: gently rolling plains dotted with the low, twisted trees providing cherished pools of shade for shepherds and their flocks in this sun-scorched interior of the Iberian peninsula. During the June-August harvest season, factory workers go into the fields and gather enough cork for nine months of stopper production. Flatbed trucks stacked high with slabs of bark gingerly navigate twisting rural lanes. Cork is a renewable resource. The bark is stripped in a steady cycle dictated by nature: from the 25th year of a tree's life, when the inner bark is ready for exposure, and then every 9-12 years, when the dead bark has thickened, for more than 100 years. Trailing the bark cutters, a woman dressed in black and wearing a straw hat paints the final digit of the year on each stripped tree so that in nine years the harvesters will know which trees to "unmask" again. --- On the Net: Cork industry site: http://www.compusmart.ab.ca/portugal/cork.htm |
