`Adviser Urges Spanish Olive Oil Industry to Make Advances - Olive Oil Times
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Adviser Urges Spanish Olive Oil Industry to Make Advances

By Daniel Williams
Jul. 16, 2010 14:01 UTC

Spanish Agricultural Adviser Warns Industry Leaders That Olive Oil Sector Needs Improvement to Match Growing Levels of Production

Ms. Clara Aguilera, Head Agricultural Adviser in Andalucía, the largest olive oil pro­duc­ing region in the world, affirmed that the Spanish olive oil sec­tor has expe­ri­enced vast advances in meth­ods of pro­duc­tion, but that there is still work to be done to com­mer­cial­ize and mar­ket these large quan­ti­ties of olive oil. She stated that Spain needs to con­tinue to act as lead­ers in this com­mer­cial­iza­tion effort, cit­ing grow­ing com­pe­ti­tion from newly emerg­ing olive oil mar­kets around
the world as a threat to Spanish dom­i­nance.

These state­ments came at a meet­ing with Antonio Ávila, Adviser of Economy, Development and Science and with other lead­ing mem­bers of the Andalucían olive oil sec­tor on July 5th. The pur­pose of the forum was to ana­lyze the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in Spain’s olive oil sec­tor and search for new ways to make Spanish olive oil more com­pet­i­tive inter­na­tion­ally. In Ms. Aguilera’s own words, the meet­ing was held to forge a dis­cus­sion about, ​“what to do with the agro-indus­try in Andalucía, a sec­tor that has already made impor­tant steps… to main­tain its cur­rent position.”[1]

Antonio Avila

Similarly, Antonio Ávila advised Andalucían olive oil com­pa­nies to begin to con­sider what kind of inter­na­tional role they would need to play in order to remain com­pet­i­tive in the future. At the same time, he was opti­mistic and stressed the great poten­tial of the Andalucían olive oil indus­try, one that employs over 55,000 peo­ple and 4,700 com­pa­nies and whose exports make up over 40% of inter­na­tional sales leav­ing south­ern Spain.

Ms. Aguilera noted that per­haps the most impor­tant advance needed would be the attain­ment of greater added value costs. To this end, she sig­naled that Andalucía needs to employ addi­tional mar­ket­ing tools like the 2013 Agro-indus­trial Horizon Plan, writ­ten jointly by social agents and econ­o­mists. She fur­ther empha­sized the need for increased inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion efforts and con­cen­tra­tion on mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives directed to increase the com­pet­i­tive­ness of Spanish olive oil: ​“This is not a sin­gle spe­cific meet­ing,” she said. ​“We are going to
con­tinue work­ing and make these efforts a real­ity in our upcom­ing encoun­ters.” 1

.

[1]“La Junta y algu­nas de las prin­ci­pales empre­sas agroal­i­men­ta­rias debaten cómo apor­tar más valor aña­dido a las pro­duc­ciones” July 7, 2010.

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