Olive Oil Production Data in Europe Reveal Divergent Trends

Olive oil pro­duc­tion is trend­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions in two European regions.

On the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal have seen their olive oil har­vests con­tin­u­ously grow to record lev­els over the past 15 years.

Last year, both coun­tries enjoyed excel­lent yields, with Spain pro­duc­ing 1,598,900 tons and Portugal pro­duc­ing 115,000 tons. These respec­tively rep­re­sent the third- and sec­ond-best har­vests the coun­tries have ever had.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the trad­ing bloc, Italy and Greece have both seen annual yields con­tinue to dimin­ish over the same period of time and at a stun­ningly sim­i­lar rate.

Italy pro­duced 265,000 tons, which is the country’s third small­est yield in more than a decade. In Greece, only 225,000 tons were pro­duced, which rep­re­sents their third worst har­vest in the past decade as well.

Several fac­tors are impact­ing pro­duc­tion across these four coun­tries, but cli­mate change may be one of the biggest. According to mul­ti­ple mete­o­rol­o­gists inter­viewed for this arti­cle, the region will con­tinue to get hot­ter and drier, in gen­eral, with more spo­radic episodes of intense cold and intense rain at vary­ing times of the year.

“In prin­ci­ple, cli­mate warm­ing, in the Mediterranean area, will mean, not only the increase in tem­per­a­tures but above all the loss of reg­u­lar­ity in atmos­pheric times,” Jorge Olcina, the head of the University of Alicante’s cli­mate insti­tute, told Olive Oil Times.

“This means that we will have more intense and abrupt changes of weather, with hot days, fol­lowed by sud­den tem­per­a­ture drops; droughts of short dura­tion but intense, punc­tu­ated by episodes of tor­ren­tial rains,” Olcina added. ​“And this will man­i­fest itself in both the east­ern and west­ern sec­tors with­out fixed peri­od­ic­ity.”

Kostas Liris, a Greek agron­o­mist and olive oil expert, agreed that sim­i­lar weather pat­terns, specif­i­cally sim­i­lar pat­terns of bad weather in recent har­vest years, have played a role in the down­ward trends of both Greek and Italian olive oil pro­duc­tion.

“The gen­eral cli­mate con­di­tions affect a lot the pro­duc­tion and between Italy and Greece, we have a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“The south of Italy and Greece share the same weather, which nat­u­rally has to do with the pro­duc­tion and the qual­ity of the oils pro­duced. When there is a lot of cold or even snow in Italy, after two to four days we have sim­i­lar weather in Greece.”

The same pat­tern applies for hot weather and con­di­tions of drought as well.

Giovanni Bianchi is the pro­ducer of 2016 NYIOOC Best in Class Argali and har­vests olives from groves in Peloponnese, which is located in south­ern Greece. He told Olive Oil Times that recent cli­matic con­di­tions have impacted his har­vest and he believes these same con­di­tions are affect­ing other pro­duc­ers in both Italy and Greece.

“My olive grove is located in Gargalianoi, in the Peloponnese, where the cli­mate is mild, and it was, usu­ally, dry from June to the end of August,” he said. ​“But in the last few years, although it does not rain, it is very humid; then, from early September, pre­cip­i­ta­tion became more fre­quent.”

“The west­ern coast of the Peloponnese is right across from Italy, and the weather events gen­er­ally occur in accor­dance with what hap­pened in south­ern Italy, in par­tic­u­lar in Puglia,” Bianchi added. ​“Farmers in this area of Greece often check the weather fore­cast for that Italian region, because it fre­quently hap­pens that a storm front moves from Puglia to this coastal strip within 24 to 36 hours.”

However, the sec­ond and the third largest pro­duc­ers in the E.U. have more in com­mon than just con­nected weather.

Tullia Gallina Toschi, a pro­fes­sor at the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences of the University of Bologna, told Olive Oil Times that the two coun­tries share sim­i­lar meth­ods of cul­ti­va­tion and pro­duc­tion, which may also help to explain the sim­i­lar­i­ties in their trends.

“This trend could be due to sim­i­lar tra­di­tional olive farm­ing sys­tems shared by these two coun­tries,” she said. ​“Indeed, Greece and Italy are char­ac­ter­ized by a frag­mented olive oil pro­duc­tion, man­aged by small farm­ers or even big pro­duc­ers, with­out sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ment of inten­sive and super-inten­sive farm­ing sys­tems, which are more com­monly imple­mented in Spain.”

“The more frag­mented and tra­di­tional pro­duc­tion of Italy and Greece, linked to many local olive cul­ti­vars and farms, and typ­i­cal olive oil pro­duc­tions – such as PDO, PGI, monocul­ti­var and high-qual­ity pro­duc­tions – leads to higher fluc­tu­a­tion in the olive oil pro­duc­tion along the years,” she added.

Farther west in Spain and Portugal the upward trend in olive oil pro­duc­tion is less closely aligned, but nonethe­less notice­ably sim­i­lar.

Climatic con­di­tions may play a small role in these sim­i­lar­i­ties, but over­all sim­i­lar pro­duc­tion tech­niques and grow­ing invest­ments are the dri­ving fac­tors behind this increased pro­duc­tion.

Jorge de Melo is the CEO of Sovena, which is one of Portugal’s largest agribusi­ness hold­ing groups. He told Olive Oil Times that both Spain and Portugal have favor­able invest­ment cli­mates, which in turn has led to improve­ments to olive cul­ti­va­tion and oil pro­duc­tion.

“The sec­tor gained a boost in both coun­tries by a favor­able envi­ron­ment for invest­ments to cre­ate infra­struc­ture and the mod­ern­iza­tion of olive groves,” he said. ​“The intro­duc­tion of new vari­eties and the intro­duc­tion of irri­ga­tion have led to increased pro­duc­tiv­ity in the two neigh­bor­ing coun­tries.”

De Melo cited the invest­ment in the Alqueva dam in Alentejo, which has allowed super-inten­sive olive groves to be cul­ti­vated in a region where they oth­er­wise would not be, as one exam­ple of how grow­ing invest­ment is fuel­ing a rise in pro­duc­tion.

“The pro­vi­sion of water for irri­ga­tion in an area with good agri­cul­tural voca­tion was the engine for the devel­op­ment of mod­ern agri­cul­ture that lever­aged the Portuguese olive sec­tor with excel­lent results in terms of quan­tity and qual­ity of the oils pro­duced,” he said.

Vincenzo Benevento, an expe­ri­enced agron­o­mist and inde­pen­dent scholar based in Calabria observed that in most cases, in the pro­duc­tive areas of Italy and Greece, irri­ga­tion is not sys­tem­atic, and often imple­mented only in case of a water emer­gency.

“Climate and rain­fall pat­terns are sim­i­lar, or even iden­ti­cal, in sev­eral areas of Greece and south­ern Italy, which accounts for most of the national pro­duc­tion of olive oil,” he said. ​“We must add to this the sim­i­lar­i­ties of the cul­ti­va­tion tech­niques, also tak­ing into account the aver­age size of farms, as the plots are often too small to allow a stream­lined phy­tosan­i­tary defense pro­gram.”

“Moreover, sev­eral olive trees are sec­u­lar, there­fore it is dif­fi­cult to change their aspect and man­age­ment, which is gen­er­ally based on non-sys­tem­atic irri­ga­tion, fer­til­iza­tion, and plant health pro­tec­tion,” he added. ​“This makes the pro­duc­tion trends of both coun­tries, which share also a sim­i­lar ratio between the uti­lized agri­cul­tural area and the num­ber of plants, more sus­cep­ti­ble to the vagaries of cli­mate.”

Meanwhile, in Spain, the process of grow­ing new super-inten­sive olive groves along with stream­lin­ing and mod­ern­iz­ing oil mills is fuel­ing the increas­ing pro­duc­tion of the world’s largest olive oil pro­ducer.

“In Spain, there are two phe­nom­ena [that have led to the increase in pro­duc­tion], the increase and the improve­ment of the pro­duc­tiv­ity through irri­ga­tion sys­tems and the cul­ti­va­tion of new plan­ta­tions.” Juan Vilar, a Spanish olive oil con­sul­tant, told Olive Oil Times.

This improved pro­duc­tiv­ity has, in turn, led to increased invest­ment both in olive groves as well as olive mills from both for­eign and domes­tic par­ties

“Instead of look­ing for areas to plant olive trees out­side of Spain, investors are look­ing for places to do so in Spain,” Vilar said. ​“For instance, in Extremadura, nearly 62,000 acres have been planted in the last five years.”

Spain and Portugal have also ben­e­fited in recent years from dif­fer­ent weather events that have come just when grow­ers needed them to.

“As regards Portugal and Spain, their pro­duc­tion increases are par­tially due to a good rainy year,” Rafael Pico Lapuente, the direc­tor of Asoliva, told Olive Oil Times. ​“In the case of Spain, it is also note­wor­thy that we have many medium-sized pro­duc­ers, with olive trees rest­ing on alter­nate years, which means there can be an increase in pro­duc­tion when the rains come.”

Barring cli­matic dis­as­ters akin to the ones that occurred in Italy and Greece this year – some­thing cli­ma­tol­o­gists have not ruled out – Spain and Portugal both have the poten­tial for record-break­ing har­vests in the com­ing years, accord­ing to Vilar.

“In Spain, there is the capac­ity to pro­duce two mil­lion tons if the weather coop­er­ates,” he added. ​“On the other hand Portugal, in more than five years will be the fifth largest pro­duc­ing coun­try in the world.”

However, with­out an increase of invest­ment and shift away from rain-fed agri­cul­tural prac­tices in Italy and Greece, Vilar pre­dicted that pro­duc­tion there will con­tinue to trend down­wards.

“Greece and Italy will, step-by-step, lose impor­tance,” he said.

More dif­fi­cult grow­ing sea­sons across the Mediterranean are almost cer­tain. While Spain and Portugal adapt by stream­lin­ing cul­ti­va­tion and milling processes, Gallina Toschi, the University of Bologna agri­cul­ture and food sci­ence pro­fes­sor, believes that Greece and Italy will have to shift their focus to qual­ity of pro­duc­tion.

Major down­ward fluc­tu­a­tions in vol­umes have not been matched by a loss of qual­ity in either of the two coun­tries, accord­ing to data from the NYIOOC. In fact, Italy and Greece have con­tin­ued to improve the qual­ity of their olive oils, par­tic­u­larly over the past two years, which can be seen in the steady increase of over­all awards as well as Gold and Best in Class awards that pro­duc­ers have received.

“In terms of qual­ity, I can say that our panel ana­lyzed and eval­u­ated excel­lent extra vir­gin olive oils, diver­si­fied in taste, extremely fra­grant and par­tic­u­larly rich in polyphe­nols,” Gallina Toschi said.