Egypt Rejoins International Olive Council

After a one year absence, Egypt has offi­cially rejoined the International Olive Council (IOC).

They did so by for­mally sign­ing onto the International Agreement on Olive Oil and Table Olives of 2015 in New York City ear­lier this month. Egypt had pre­vi­ously been a mem­ber of the IOC from 1964 until 2017 when its mem­ber­ship was revoked for fail­ing to sign the agree­ment.

The move was applauded by Abdellatif Ghedira, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the IOC, who said that Egypt’s mem­ber­ship to the IOC is impor­tant, espe­cially in terms of expand­ing its olive and olive oil pro­duc­tion sec­tors.

Last month Ghedira met with Agriculture and Land Reclamation Minister Abdel Mon’em el Bana in Cairo to dis­cuss the invest­ment plan. As part of the agree­ment, Egypt will receive finan­cial grants to sup­port olive grow­ers, includ­ing funds for an ini­tia­tive to plant 1.5 mil­lion trees in Egypt’s west­ern desert.

Egypt is cur­rently the largest pro­ducer of table olives in the world and the ninth largest pro­ducer of olive oil. Olive oil pro­duc­tion grew by 21 per­cent last year and is expected to grow by another 25 per­cent in the com­ing year.

Hishem el Hossary, the under­sec­re­tary of the com­mit­tee of agri­cul­ture, irri­ga­tion, food secu­rity and ani­mal health, said that Egypt’s mem­ber­ship in the IOC had ben­e­fited the country’s olive oil indus­try immensely by improv­ing the phys­i­cal and chem­i­cal prop­er­ties of Egyptian olive oil.

He pointed to recent awards for Egyptian olive oil at the Agency for the Valorization of Agricultural Products’ annual com­pe­ti­tion in Paris as evi­dence of this. An Egyptian extra vir­gin olive oil by Wadi Food won a Gold Award at this year’s New York International Olive Oil Competition and won a Best In Class and Silver at the com­pe­ti­tion in 2015.

After Egypt’s removal from the IOC, it took the country’s house of rep­re­sen­ta­tives one year to read and review the updated agree­ment, which had pre­vi­ously been signed in 2005.

The new agree­ment changed the require­ments for coun­tries to enter the IOC, mak­ing it eas­ier. It also pro­vided inter­na­tional pro­tec­tion for the geo­graph­i­cal indi­ca­tions agreed on by mem­bers as well as encour­aged the trans­fer of tech­nol­ogy, cul­ti­va­tion and pro­duc­tion tech­niques among mem­ber nations.

The leg­isla­tive body signed off on the new agree­ment on January 8 of this year and sent it to the desk of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi to be rat­i­fied. He did so on January 29.

It took another two months for the agree­ment to be offi­cially signed in New York, par­tially due to pres­i­den­tial elec­tions which took place at the end of March. During the cam­paign, Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry met Ghedira in Madrid to dis­cuss final­iz­ing the agree­ment and Egypt chair­ing the IOC in 2019.

“Shoukry and Ghedira wel­comed the return of Egypt to the coun­cil,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said. “[And] Egypt is planned to chair the IOC in 2019.”

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• Olive Oil Times