Argentina Olive Harvest Begins Amid Covid-19 Lockdown

The 2020 olive har­vest­ing sea­son has got­ten under­way in Argentina, in spite of Latin America’s largest olive oil pro­ducer enter­ing the third week of a nation-wide lock­down due to the coro­n­avirus.

While all non-essen­tial work­ers have been ordered to stay in their homes, olive grow­ers have been prepar­ing to head out into the groves to pick the first fruits of the year.

Due to the decen­tral­ized nature of Argentina’s olive groves and the sheer size of the coun­try, the har­vest sea­son always comes with logis­ti­cal chal­lenges. However, these have been com­pounded by the Covid-19 pan­demic this year.

“Before the quar­an­tine, pro­duc­ers already had dif­fi­culty find­ing work­ers to har­vest olives that would later be trans­formed into oil,” Alejandro Ovando, the direc­tor of IES Consultores, an agribusi­ness con­sul­tancy, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Now added to this is the decreed period of quar­an­tine that will make the process even more dif­fi­cult, although pro­duc­ers should man­age to over­come the low pro­duc­tion level reg­is­tered in 2019.”

According to the International Olive Council (IOC), Argentina pro­duced 20,000 tons of olive oil in 2019. Ovando esti­mates that pro­duc­tion in 2020 will be around 35,000 tons, but warned that this fig­ure is likely to change as the har­vest pro­gresses.

“The process will not be with­out dif­fi­cul­ties for pro­duc­ers,” he said.

However, not all pro­duc­ers will be impacted equally by the coro­n­avirus. Situated in the moun­tain­ous north­west­ern province of La Rioja, which has had four coro­n­avirus cases to date, South America’s largest olive oil pro­duc­tion com­pany has already begun to har­vest its high-den­sity olive groves.

“We are already har­vest­ing at full capac­ity,” Frankie Gobbee, the co-founder and direc­tor of the Argentina Olive Group (AOG), told Olive Oil Times. ​“With mechan­i­cal har­vest­ing, it is sim­pler [to fol­low gov­ern­ment social dis­tanc­ing and san­i­tary rec­om­men­da­tions] than with man­ual har­vest­ing. Luckily, we do a lot of mechan­i­cal har­vest­ing.”

Many small and tra­di­tional pro­duc­ers, on the other hand, are either unwill­ing or unable to use mechan­i­cal har­vesters. Instead, they will still need to con­tract and orga­nize labor­ers to head into the groves and har­vest their olives.

Some pro­duc­ers located in provinces more affected by the coro­n­avirus, such as Mendoza which has had 113 cases and seven deaths to date, are even more likely to face labor short­ages.

“Small pro­duc­ers will have a hard time get­ting har­vesters,” Gobbee said.

In spite of these chal­lenges, he still expects Argentina will have a more pro­duc­tive year in 2020 than it did in 2019, though he is not as opti­mistic as Ovando.

“I think the har­vest will be more in the order of 30,000 tons,” he said. ​“Although the FOA (Argentine Olive Federation) esti­mates 20,000 to 25,000 tons.”

Along with cre­at­ing new chal­lenges for pro­duc­ers, Covid-19 is also likely to impact olive oil sales in Argentina and abroad.

“Producers could see a decline in domes­tic sales and an increase in sales abroad as a con­se­quence of the change in con­sump­tion trends toward essen­tial and lower-value goods,” Ovando said.

Olive oil con­sump­tion has always been quite low in Argentina. According to the IOC, Argentines con­sumed 7,500 tons of olive oil in the 2018/19 crop year. The vast major­ity of the country’s pro­duc­tion is des­tined for export.

However, a global eco­nomic slow­down has led to sig­nif­i­cantly decreased con­sumer spend­ing in Europe and North America, two of the largest mar­kets for Argentine olive oil exports.

This means that pro­duc­ers may have to wait until mas­sive stim­u­lus pack­ages orches­trated by gov­ern­ments across the Northern Hemisphere kick in and infec­tion rates decrease, before exports return to nor­mal.

“Regarding exports, we believe that there will be a slower rate of ship­ment of sam­ples and mer­chan­dise,” Gobbee said. ​“But they will develop nor­mally if things are main­tained as they are today.”