`Olive Oil Sales and Exports on the Rise in Tunisia and Spain - Olive Oil Times
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Olive Oil Sales and Exports on the Rise in Tunisia and Spain

By Paolo DeAndreis
Apr. 11, 2022 12:29 UTC

Two of the world’s largest olive oil pro­duc­ers are see­ing their sales grow. In recent weeks, both Spain and Tunisia reported a higher value from sales, with Spain also record­ing higher traded vol­umes.

Spain’s Food Information and Control Agency (AICA) reported 140,778 tons of monthly sales for February, exceed­ing the pre­vi­ous months of the crop year. Spanish pro­duc­ers have sold 707,391 tons dur­ing the cur­rent 2021/22 crop year.

AICA fig­ures also show that national olive oil pro­duc­tion in February reached 105,478 tons, bring­ing total pro­duc­tion close to 1.5 mil­lion tons for the cur­rent sea­son.

See Also:Trade News

Still, logis­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties cre­ated by the recent truck dri­vers’ strike led the pres­i­dent of the agri-food coop­er­a­tives in Jaén, Higinio Castellano, to empha­size that pro­duc­ers are expe­ri­enc­ing sig­nif­i­cant losses.

“[Olive oil stored in bulk] remains in the tanks by force, which pre­vents coop­er­a­tive mem­bers from ful­fill­ing the con­tracts signed with com­pa­nies of any kind in the retail sec­tor,” Castellano said. ​“Nor has pack­aged oil sold over the inter­net reached the pri­vate con­sumer.”

As a result, grow­ers asso­ci­a­tions in the coun­try’s major pro­duc­ing dis­tricts con­firmed a slight price increase. For exam­ple, the Jaén-based chap­ter of the Association of Young Farmers and Ranchers (Asaja) said that, from March 14 to March 20, extra vir­gin olive oil was priced at €3,674 per ton.

Extra vir­gin olive oil prices also pro­vide some relief to Tunisian pro­duc­ers, hit by lower-than-expected olive yields in the cur­rent sea­son.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries fig­ures, which were reported by Agence Ecofin, Tunisian olive oil sales hit 620 mil­lion Tunisian dinars (€190 mil­lion) in the first three months of the crop year. This rep­re­sents a 32-per­cent increase com­pared with the same period in the pre­vi­ous crop year. The min­istry added that 18 per­cent of those sales are due to exports.

According to Onagri, the National Observatory on Agriculture, the rea­sons for these encour­ag­ing num­bers are due to the 40-per­cent spike in aver­age olive oil export price.

See Also:Olive Oil and Table Olive Imports Slip

In January 2022, prices reached €3.20 per kilo­gram com­pared to €3.40 per kilo­gram reported in Spain. That growth bal­anced out the reduc­tion in Tunisian export vol­umes, which fell to 59,400 thou­sand tons com­pared with the 62,000 tons of the pre­vi­ous year.

The Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries also reported that organic olive grow­ing and organic farm­ing are becom­ing more rel­e­vant in the North African coun­try.

The min­istry said Tunisia is the African coun­try with the largest farm­ing area devoted to organic farm­ing, and it is the first regard­ing organic olive grow­ing.

Some experts believe that the next months for the olive oil mar­ket will fol­low unex­pected routes.

In Spain, some believe that it will mostly be due to the tur­moil gen­er­ated by the Russo-Ukrainian War on the edi­ble oils mar­ket.

According to local media reports in Spain, some vir­gin olive oil in the coun­try is being refined to obtain lam­pante oil, one of the low­est qual­ity olive oil grades, due to ris­ing demand due to the short­age of sun­flower oil.

Sources in the sec­tor told Agroinformación that this option ​“is on the table and some brands are already doing it.”

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