`Olive Mills Open in Jordan With Average Harvest Predicted - Olive Oil Times
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Olive Mills Open in Jordan With Average Harvest Predicted

By Julie Al-Zoubi
Oct. 9, 2020 09:56 UTC

Jordan opened up its 132 olive oil mills across the king­dom this week for the start of the 2020/21 har­vest­ing sea­son.

An aver­age sea­son has been pre­dicted by pro­duc­ers and mill own­ers, with olive oil pro­duc­tion esti­mated at between 23,000 and 24,000 tons.

See Also:Ancient Olive Trees Burn in Jordan Wildfires

Jordan’s envi­ron­ment min­is­ter and act­ing min­is­ter of agri­cul­ture, Saleh Kharabsheh, announced the open­ing of the mills and said that the min­istry would ensure mill own­ers adhered to the kingdom’s envi­ron­men­tal and health poli­cies.

Jordan aver­ages an annual olive yield of around 150,000 tons, of which 80 per­cent is used to pro­duce the kingdom’s usual 22,000 to 24,000 tons of olive oil. The remain­ing 20 per­cent is reserved for table olives.

Nidal Samain, spokesman for the kingdom’s olive oil pro­duc­ers and mill own­ers syn­di­cate con­firmed this season’s lower antic­i­pated pro­duc­tion lev­els.

“Olive oil pro­duc­tion this year would be suf­fi­cient to cover domes­tic con­sump­tion and exports,” he told The Jordan Times. ​“Currently we only have pre­lim­i­nary esti­mates, but when the sea­son begins, things will become clearer.”

Samain attrib­uted the decline in this year’s olive har­vest to high tem­per­a­tures and the effects of nat­u­rally occur­ring alter­nate bear­ing. (A larger than aver­age crop one year fol­lowed by a smaller crop the fol­low­ing year.)

Jordan is home to around 10.5 mil­lion olive trees cov­er­ing 56,000 hectares (138,400 acres) of olive groves which take up around 72 per­cent of the kingdom’s agri­cul­tural land. Most of Jordan’s olive groves are located in the north of the coun­try and pro­vide liveli­hoods to more than 80,000 Jordanian house­holds.

Earlier this year Olive Oil times reported that much of Jordan’s olive oil from the 2019/20 har­vest sea­son remained in stor­age due to weaker domes­tic and inter­na­tional demand and Covid-19 con­tain­ment mea­sures, which pre­vented the mar­ket­ing of olive oil.

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