Yet, these imported chestnuts aren’t Corsican chestnuts, as they’ve been selected and bred for fresh consumption. The prices have ballooned to $8 euros/pound due to the fact that people are now foraging for them in an untended, overgrown forest, rather than harvesting from the abundance of stewarded chestnut forests that once fueled a culture of mountainous people.Īs a result of the chestnut shortage and inflated price, chestnuts are being imported from mainland France at less than half the cost. Because the trees are yielding fewer nuts, it is becoming harder and harder to harvest them. Because there are no people around to revive these forests, chestnut yields are in decline. The forests here, she told me, are sick from abandonment, a theme that became amplified as we talked to more people. Though some own land in the Castagniccia, most young people have moved to the coast or to mainland France for jobs, only returning for short periods of time- usually only time enough to pick up a small amount of chestnuts in a season. The first night in the Castagniccia region, in the heart of the Corsican chestnut forest, we talked with an Innkeeper about the surrounding chestnuts, provoking an unexpected story of rural flight from Corsica’s young people.
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