Spanish Olive Oil Prices Increase for First Time in Three Months

Olive oil prices in Spain have slightly increased after falling more than 30 per­cent in the last three months.

Prices for vir­gin, extra vir­gin and lam­pante hit their low­est point last week before ris­ing by an aver­age of about €0.30 ($0.35) per kilo­gram. According to the International Olive Council, Spanish extra vir­gin olive oil was sell­ing at €2.61 ($3.07) per kilo­gram and refined olive oils were sell­ing at €2.20 ($2.59) before the price bump.

Some in the olive oil sec­tor believe that the prices are ris­ing because sales increased in May. The exact num­bers will be released later this month. May is gen­er­ally a good month for olive oil sales in Spain and sum­mer months gen­er­ally have higher sales as well.

“This sit­u­a­tion con­firms what we have been stat­ing in this period of time,” Cristóbal Cano told Olive Oil Times. Cano is the sec­re­tary gen­eral of UPA Jaén, an orga­ni­za­tion that lob­bies for fair prices for agri­cul­tural com­modi­ties, and believes that there was no rea­son for the prices to be so low in the first place, which is why he expects them to rebound.

“It was an unreal sit­u­a­tion and with­out any objec­tive data that jus­ti­fied that drop in the price,” he said. ​“The mar­ket was prac­ti­cally dead and domes­tic sales were low since the buy­ers had gone to third-party coun­tries for their acqui­si­tions.”

Spanish olive oil dis­trib­u­tors have recently been refresh­ing their stock­piles by pur­chas­ing excess oil pro­duced in Italy and Greece. However, both coun­tries are expected to expe­ri­ence decreased pro­duc­tion com­pared with last year, accord­ing to fore­casts seen by Cano. He said Spanish olive oil pro­duc­ers are set to fill that void.

“Now [those buy­ers will] have to focus on the province of Jaén,” he said. “[This should] increase both the demand and, we hope con­se­quently, price.”

Cano does not expect Spain to have an excep­tion­ally good har­vest this year, but he said this will be a com­mon theme among north­ern hemi­sphere pro­duc­ers. Meanwhile, demand for olive oil is expected to keep grow­ing and there­fore, the price should as well.

“Yes, I expect prices to keep ris­ing because every day that passes con­firms that the next cam­paign will not be excep­tional, but it will be very sim­i­lar to world­wide har­vests,” he said.

Rafael Pico Lapuente is the direc­tor of Asoliva, an asso­ci­a­tion of indus­trial pack­ers and Spanish exporters of olive oil. He agrees that sup­ply and demand influ­ence the prices of olive oil, but he thinks prices might decrease again.

“In my opin­ion, the prices will go down some­what, but I do not think much,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“We will have to wait to know the pro­duc­tions of other coun­tries, and every­thing points to that they will be lower than last year.”

The decrease that Pico Lapuente pre­dicts might take place due to a lack of activ­ity on the inter­na­tional olive oil mar­ket, which has seen bench­mark weekly pro­ducer prices in Spain, Italy, Greece and Tunisia decrease or remain steady through­out the spring, accord­ing to the IOC. Ultimately, Pico Lapuente admit­ted that he does not know what will hap­pen.

“If I knew how they are going to change, surely I would live much bet­ter,” he said. ​“That being said, the fact that prices have risen a bit is not sig­nif­i­cant because the mar­ket was very sta­tion­ary.”

At a meet­ing late last month in Mengíbar, Jaén, hun­dreds of mem­bers from all chap­ters of the Association of Young Farmers (ASAJA) gath­ered to dis­cuss the price decreases (which hap­pened a few days before the slight increase). The group’s pres­i­dent, Cristóbal Gallego Martínez, had a sim­i­lar mes­sage to that of Cano, say­ing that he could not under­stand why prices con­tin­ued to decrease in spite of sev­eral pos­i­tive indi­ca­tors.

“According to the data we han­dle, the greater cur­rent prod­uct avail­abil­ity in Spain, com­pared to our com­peti­tors, will change the dynam­ics of the mar­ket between now and the end of the cam­paign,” he told the gath­er­ing. ​“And while imports will decrease, the exports will rebound.”

In spite of his frus­tra­tion, Gallego Martínez was opti­mistic about the future. He pointed out that the unusu­ally wet spring brought much-needed relief to drought-rid­den south­ern Spain, which led the Ministry of Agriculture to revise their pro­duc­tion esti­mates for the 2018/19 cam­paign.

“[This data] shows that there are no objec­tive rea­sons for the cur­rent price lev­els to be occur­ring,” he said.

However, a spokesper­son from the ASAJA Jaén chap­ter told Olive Oil Times that the orga­ni­za­tion would not make any pre­dic­tions on whether or not the prices would con­tinue to go up until they received the most recent sales fig­ures.

• Ideal


• ASAJA Jaén