Production in Turkey Stumbles After Bad Harvest, but Trends Upwards

Olive oil pro­duc­tion in Turkey dipped by 37 per­cent for the 2018/19 crop year, accord­ing to data pro­vided to Olive Oil Times by the International Olive Council (IOC).

However, Turkish olive oil pro­duc­tion is trend­ing upwards and, in spite of his year being an off-year in the world’s fifth-largest olive oil pro­duc­ing coun­try, the yield is esti­mated to be higher than it was in three of the past four har­vest sea­sons.

The IOC esti­mated that Turkey will pro­duce 183,000 tons of oil this crop year, a 2.8 per­cent increase com­pared with the pre­vi­ous off-year har­vest (2016/17) and a 14.4 per­cent increase com­pared with the off-year before that (2014/15).

This steady increase has been fueled by the Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture’s mas­sive plant­ing pro­grams that have taken place over the bet­ter part of the past two decades.
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“Turkey has had an increase in its olive tree pop­u­la­tion in the past 10 to 15 years,” Chris Dologh, the gen­eral man­ager at Kristal Oil and board mem­ber of the IOC, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Now we are sec­ond after Spain in terms of the num­ber of olive trees planted.”

Many of these trees, which were planted as saplings, are now enter­ing full matu­rity. This, Dologh points out, has fueled the recent boom in olive oil pro­duc­tion.

Last year, Turkey pro­duced a record high 263,000 tons. This was the sec­ond time the coun­try has exceeded the 200,000-ton bench­mark, with the last time being back in 1996/97. Dologh believes that soon Turkey will exceed this bench­mark every year, even in off-years.

However, to do that, he acknowl­edged, Turkish pro­duc­ers will need to use more indus­trial agri­cul­tural prac­tices.

“Since pro­duc­tion is still not done at the indus­trial level like it is in Spain, the pro­duc­tion yield is not as high as it could be,” Dologh said.

Ümmühan Tibet, the chair­man of the board of Turkey’s Olive and Olive Oil Council (UZZK, as it is known by its Turkish ini­tials), believes that Turkey has the poten­tial to become the world’s sec­ond-largest pro­ducer of olive oil, but also acknowl­edged that cli­mate change will ulti­mately deter­mine the sector’s future suc­cess.

“Our olive indus­try has been con­tin­u­ously devel­op­ing after newly planted saplings began pro­duc­ing fruits,” Tibet told Olive Oil Times. ​“We believe that our yield will increase much more accord­ing to the num­ber of trees and we will con­se­quently achieve the tar­get of world’s sec­ond pro­ducer with this olive oil pro­duc­tion amount.“

“However, this devel­op­ment can’t be com­pletely reflected on pro­duc­tion fig­ures due to the effect of global warm­ing and adverse weather con­di­tions expe­ri­enced for the last four to five years,” she added.

This year, Turkish pro­duc­ers espe­cially felt the effects of cli­mate change. An unusu­ally hot and dry sum­mer caused olive trees to drop their fruit a month ear­lier than expected, mean­ing the har­vest began in September instead of October.

“The olives ripened early due to hot and dry sum­mer. Most of the olives were black even in mid-late September in some areas,” Bahar Alan, co-owner of Ayvalık-based Nova Vera, told Olive Oil Times. ​“The weather was too warm until the end of October, which was not good for the early har­vested olive oils espe­cially.”

Alan expects a pro­duc­tion decrease by as much as 30 per­cent this year, much of which he attrib­uted to the dry weather. A recent cli­mate report pub­lished by the Istanbul Policy Center, an inde­pen­dent research insti­tute, con­cluded that key agri­cul­tural regions in Turkey will likely con­tinue to dry out.

“Currently, the coun­try is expe­ri­enc­ing a period of drought, and cli­mate pro­jec­tions indi­cate a fall in water poten­tial,” the report said. ​“Additionally, the Aegean Region, one of the most impor­tant regions for fruit pro­duc­tion, will be also adversely affected as a result of tem­per­a­ture increase.”

If this trend con­tin­ues, Alan said he will begin installing drip irri­ga­tion sys­tems on his trees, which are located in the north­ern Aegean region. These trees, Alan said, have never needed irri­ga­tion before.

“We are plan­ning to imple­ment irri­ga­tion sys­tems in these groves as well to pro­tect the prod­uct qual­ity,” he said. ​“We hope that 2019/20 will be a bet­ter year.”

Farther south of Ayvalık, in the south­west­ern cor­ner of the Aegean region, Merve Doran, the co-owner of Oleamea, expe­ri­enced sub­stan­tial losses as well.

“In terms of both qual­ity and quan­tity, it was­n’t as good com­pared to last year,” she told Olive Oil Times. ​“We were not sur­prised, but still very much dis­ap­pointed with the results.”

Doran attrib­uted these losses not only to the dry sum­mer, but also to a whole slew of other cli­mate irreg­u­lar­i­ties.

“Because of the shift­ing in the sea­sons, spring rain­fall arrives later than it used to and this delays our tim­ing for the har­vest period,” she said. ​“Also, we were hit by heavy rain­fall and freeze, which reduced the size of our crop.”

Like Alan, she believes the crop will rebound in 2019/20, but does not hold an overly opti­mistic view of the sector’s future.

“Compared to this year, yes we expect a rebound for the 2019/20 har­vest year,” she said. ​“However again, com­pared to a decade ago, it is not going to be the same. As peo­ple who deal with agri­cul­ture day-to-day know, the true value of soil, water and weather, is never going to be like the old times.”

While not directly acknowl­edg­ing these sen­ti­ments, Ümmühan Tibet said that cli­mate change is some­thing that all IOC mem­ber states will need to address and she sees com­mon ground for coop­er­a­tion on this front.

“Undoubtedly, cli­mate change is also adversely affect­ing other tra­di­tional olive pro­duc­ing coun­tries located in the Mediterranean region like our coun­try,” she said. ​“In this respect, we have to research how we can [mit­i­gate the effects] of cli­mate change, and tell our pro­duc­ers the results of this research.”

• Istanbul Policy Center