`Greek Olive Oil Mills on the Road to Perdition - Olive Oil Times
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enEnglishfrFrançaiselελληνικάdeDeutscheitItalianozh-CN中文ptPortuguêsesEspañoltrTürkçehrHrvatskija日本語hiहिंदी

Greek Olive Oil Mills on the Road to Perdition

By Costas Vasilopoulos
Apr. 25, 2012 20:40 UTC

“I love nature, the trees and the olives, but I must be a total fool,” farmer Georgois Nikolaou told Spiegel Magazine last year

The Directorate General for Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Commission will soon release a study regard­ing the olive oil sec­tor, which will be the basis for an open dis­cus­sion about olive oil. The scope is to receive and exam­ine sug­ges­tions on how to con­front the struc­tural prob­lems of the sec­tor in the European Union as a whole.

The struc­tural prob­lems of the oil sec­tor in Greece con­tin­u­ously under­mine devel­op­ment and prof­itabil­ity of the oil indus­try. Many adverse facts are reported, such as small mills of out­dated tech­nol­ogy, small stan­dard­iz­ing com­pa­nies with con­se­quently weak pro­mot­ing and mar­ket­ing capa­bil­i­ties, frag­men­ta­tion of the indus­try and high pro­duc­tion costs due to small olive groves and low labor pro­duc­tiv­ity.

To add insult to injury, accord­ing to a recent AEMO report, the tra­di­tional meth­ods of olive cul­ti­va­tion are no longer viable, not to men­tion the dimin­ish­ing CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) sub­si­dies.

All these mean that a pre­vi­ously healthy sec­tor of the Greek agri­cul­tural indus­try is now declin­ing rapidly, trapped in an envi­ron­ment of uncer­tainty and stag­na­tion.

Today, it seems more than urgent that the afore­men­tioned ini­tia­tive of the European Commission has to pro­duce some applic­a­ble solu­tions to direct the olive oil indus­try in Greece and Europe back to the road of devel­op­ment.


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