`Iraq Announces Plans to Rejoin Olive Council - Olive Oil Times
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Iraq Announces Plans to Rejoin Olive Council

By Ofeoritse Daibo
Dec. 30, 2024 16:52 UTC

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani has announced his coun­try’s inten­tion to rejoin the International Olive Council (IOC).

Al Sudani made the announce­ment dur­ing his meet­ing with the IOC exec­u­tive direc­tor Jaime Lillio in Madrid to dis­cuss the steps taken by the Iraqi gov­ern­ment to rejoin the inter­gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion.

“If Iraq wishes to become a mem­ber of the IOC, it will need to sub­mit a for­mal appli­ca­tion to the orga­ni­za­tion,” an IOC offi­cial told Olive Oil Times. ​“From that point, a process would begin in which the Council of Members would decide on the quota to be assigned to Iraq.”

See Also:China Shows Interest in Becoming Olive Council Member

The quota deter­mines the size of Iraq’s finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion to the IOC and its vot­ing rights. The quota is cal­cu­lated based on the country’s olive sec­tor activ­ity.

Once the appli­ca­tion is sub­mit­ted, the Iraqi par­lia­ment must rat­ify the 2015 International Agreement on Olive Oil and Table Olives. Al Sudani said this process is already under­way.

“Once these steps are com­pleted, Iraq would offi­cially become an IOC mem­ber, with rights and oblig­a­tions,” the IOC offi­cial said. ​“Nationals of Iraq would ben­e­fit from the IOC’s activ­i­ties, par­tic­u­larly in tech­ni­cal coop­er­a­tion.”

“The coun­try would also be required to respect and enforce the IOC trade stan­dard, which pro­tects con­sumers by ensur­ing the appli­ca­tion of qual­ity stan­dards for olive oil and table olives,” the offi­cial added.

Iraq ini­tially joined the IOC in 2008 but with­drew a few years later due to eco­nomic and admin­is­tra­tive dif­fi­cul­ties.

The IOC said that Iraq’s deci­sion to rejoin marks a deci­sive step towards the coun­try’s rein­te­gra­tion into the orga­ni­za­tion and its com­mit­ment to revi­tal­iz­ing its olive sec­tor.

According to IOC data, olive oil pro­duc­tion in Iraq is neg­li­gi­ble, but the coun­try pro­duces about 10,000 met­ric tons of table olives annu­ally.

The olive sec­tor has faced a series of set­backs over the past decade, includ­ing olive groves in the north­west of the coun­try dam­aged by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) dur­ing its occu­pa­tion from 2014 through 2017.

“Orchards, olive groves, and crops of wheat and bar­ley were destroyed,” a 2022 report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) found. ​“A joint assess­ment by the World Bank and the Iraqi gov­ern­ment esti­mated the total cost of dam­age to the agri­cul­ture sec­tor in Nineveh at around 1377 bil­lion dinars ($95 mil­lion).”

“In Bashiqa, for exam­ple, ISIS dec­i­mated olive groves con­tain­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of olive trees, some of them cen­turies old,” the report added. ​“The town’s once thriv­ing olive trade spe­cial­iz­ing in oil and soap suf­fered gravely as a result.”

Aside from con­flict, Iraqi olive farm­ers have faced var­i­ous other chal­lenges, includ­ing high elec­tric­ity and fuel costs.

“Electricity is very expen­sive, and there is no sup­port for farm­ers like sub­si­dized elec­tric­ity or fuel,” an olive farmer in Bashiqa told Sipr.

Fierce com­pe­ti­tion from imported table olives has also hurt local pro­duc­ers, who often find it dif­fi­cult to sell them at com­pet­i­tive prices on the domes­tic mar­ket.

“Imported olives have largely affected our mar­ket, and the gov­ern­ment does not sup­port us at all,” Ali Jarjis, another olive farmer in Bashiqa, told Kurdish news agency Rudaw.

Despite the chal­lenges, there have been efforts to revi­tal­ize the sec­tor for sev­eral years.

In 2022, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) iden­ti­fied olives as a strate­gic crop for the drought-prone regions of north­ern and north­west­ern Iraq.

To that end, the U.N. World Food Program helped open a state-of-the-art olive oil mill in Bashiqa, while the U.N. Development Program is back­ing efforts to plant olive trees in the neat Haditha in the cen­ter-west of the coun­try.

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