You see, dear Maxima, Cyprus was once filled with orchards like these you see here at the presidential palace. Spring would fill the air with fragrance. We even held festivals and crowned Miss Orange queens.
A bit folksy perhaps, but as you’ve noticed, we do enjoy our folklore. Most of the orchards were taken by the Turks, but even those that remained – we dried them up and divided them into building plots. Who has time to prune trees, dig soil, harvest fruit, and look for buyers?
It’s far easier to find people interested in buying passports than mandarins and oranges. Especially if the orange groves are in coastal areas. Sell a plot, build a tower or hotel, and your troubles are over. We’ve kept this little orchard here as a memento.
As for oranges, there are orange trees elsewhere. And vineyards and olive groves and wheat fields… We’re in the building business now. We’ve become developers.
And, you see, dear Alexander, this red soil produces the tastiest potatoes. We know you like them in the Netherlands. You sell them at kiosks, fried in little cups with plenty of salt or mayonnaise.
We grew up on potatoes too. Fried or roasted with meat. These days though, we prefer sweet potatoes – they’re less fattening, so the experts say.
We import them like everything else. Even garlic. And peanuts and bananas. Next time you visit, we’ll take you to Paphos to see the banana trees. What’s left of them anyway.
We prefer building tourist complexes and villas on our fields rather than growing potatoes and bananas and whatnot. That’s how we support your economy. We import everything from the Netherlands, as you well know.
Who wants to wade through soil, worry about hailstorms destroying the harvest, or search for workers to gather potatoes, to sow and to reap?
And as I was saying, my dear friends, in the Netherlands there’s a saying the locals proudly recite: “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands”. That’s because much of their land lies below sea level.
Yet the Netherlands is the second-largest exporter of food and agricultural products in the world, after the USA. And you don’t need to bend over or milk anything.
There are new technologies for that. As for revenue, tomato exports alone bring in 2 billion, meat exports 8 billion, flower exports 12 billion.
In 2021, agricultural exports totalled 105 billion. And we don’t need to destroy our land by building on it.
You keep building, and we’ll sell you everything. It won’t taste the same as what you once knew, but who will remember those flavours anyway?
