Low Algerian Olive Oil Exports Blamed on 'Persistent Social Hurdles'

The region of Kabylia, located in the north of Algeria, pro­duces around nine mil­lion liters (around 7,000 tons) of olive oil annu­ally. Despite the abun­dance of that nat­ural wealth the region has strug­gled to export its oil because of deeply-rooted social sys­tem that is hard to work with, even for local offi­cial author­i­ties.

Olive oil trees grow nat­u­rally in Kabylia and demand min­i­mal care. Normally, that would mean olive oil expor­ta­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties are rife, yet Kabylia remains anchored in old-fash­ioned busi­ness prac­tices pre­vent­ing it from doing so.

In Kabylia, each fam­ily pos­sesses its own olive par­cel, which is usu­ally no more than a few dozen olive trees. Each gen­er­a­tion of grow­ers trans­mits its par­cel to the next one, and so on. An over­whelm­ing major­ity of Kabylians are vis­cer­ally attached to their parcels and con­sider con­sum­ing one’s own olive oil to be bet­ter than sell­ing it.

At best, they sell it through old-fash­ioned chan­nels and acquain­tances. That kind of rudi­men­tary com­mer­cial trans­ac­tion has severely impacted Kabylia’s cap­i­tal­iz­ing on lucra­tive for­eign mar­kets and gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions have yet to come up with appro­pri­ate solu­tions.

Indeed, for­eign part­ners have a hard time import­ing olive oil from Kabylia. Kamel Boudjadi, a jour­nal­ist for Algerian news­pa­per L’Expression who has cov­ered Kabylia’s olive oil mar­ket trends, has fol­lowed the path of a young man resid­ing in France who wished to import olive oil from Kabylia.

(Editor’s note: The Algerian news­pa­per L’Expression stated that Algeria’s pro­duc­tion of nine mil­lion liters was ​“roughly equiv­a­lent to the pro­duc­tion of coun­tries like Tunisia and Spain,” but it is, in fact, a tiny frac­tion of the out­put of either).

The man cre­ated a com­pany and was look­ing to import Algerian olive oil in order to sell it on the French mar­ket which is an impor­tant seg­ment of the large Algerian dias­pora. That plan did not go as planned as he strug­gled to obtain the quan­tity he desired because of the way Kabylian grow­ers do busi­ness.

Firstly, many local grow­ers out­right refused to sell him olive oil. Moreover, deal­ing with the ones who actu­ally were will­ing was a dif­fi­cult task as it required buy­ing from hun­dreds of house­holds to gen­er­ate sig­nif­i­cant vol­ume, which proved to be a busi­ness night­mare. The young man even­tu­ally quit the import busi­ness, dis­cour­aged.

Algerian author­i­ties are aware of Kabylia’s lim­i­ta­tions but have had a hard time orga­niz­ing the local olive oil indus­try due to its immense frag­men­ta­tion. Doing so would very likely turn out to be a colos­sal task as it would require mak­ing thou­sands of house­holds adhere to the same pro­duc­tion and busi­ness stan­dards; gov­ern­ment offi­cials have tried doing so, but failed every time.

It has proven almost impos­si­ble for gov­ern­men­tal reg­u­lat­ing bod­ies to stan­dard­ize the Kabylian olive oil indus­try from the har­vest of olive trees to the expor­ta­tion of their oil. In such con­di­tions, yield­ing and sell­ing olive oil that meets san­i­tary and gus­ta­tory stan­dards to poten­tial for­eign busi­ness part­ners might remain an intri­cate chal­lenge for Kabylia in the years to come.

• L’Expression — Le Quotidien


• Huile d’o­live de Kabylie