Harvest Winds Down in Greece with Mixed Results

As the 2020 har­vest draws to an end in Greece, data released by the European Commission reveal a mediocre sea­son of olive oil pro­duc­tion with a pro­jected out­put of around 265,000 tons.

Other esti­mates, though, pre­dict a lower total of 230,000 to 240,000 tons.

The lack­lus­ter sea­son is reflected in sev­eral olive oil mak­ing ter­ri­to­ries of the coun­try, with grow­ers and pro­duc­ers expect­ing less than their usual out­put.

“This sea­son, the whole region of Laconia will give almost half of its usual 30,000 tons of olive oil, mainly because of the heat­wave of last spring,” Giorgos Korinnis, an agri­cul­tur­ist and pro­ducer from Laconia in the Peloponnese, told Olive Oil Times.

Korinnis said the warm weather was enough to over­turn the nat­ural devel­op­ment of the olive fruits to matu­rity.

“It may seem like a small period, but the four con­sec­u­tive days in May with unusu­ally high tem­per­a­tures soar­ing above 35°C (95°F) took a heavy toll on the olive trees in the region,” he said. ​“The olive fruits ended up being wrin­kled with not enough juice inside at the time of pro­cess­ing, giv­ing less olive oil than they should.”

Korinnis also described the lack of man­power as a sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem which made the har­vest more dif­fi­cult to com­plete.

“Foreign land labor­ers were dif­fi­cult to come by due to the travel restric­tions,” he said. ​“We had to be resource­ful to har­vest our olives by uti­liz­ing all means avail­able. I even know a pro­ducer who bought an auto­matic har­vest­ing machine for €60,000 to over­come the scarcity of work­ers, but of course, not every­body can do the same.”

Further south in Crete, mill owner and exporter Manos Rodanakis of Nutricreta from Sitia in the east­ern part of the island also expects a mid-range har­vest this sea­son.

“The whole island of Crete fares 60 per­cent of its usual pro­duc­tion and Sitia is expected to make around 7,000 tons of olive oil, com­pared to 14,000 tons in highly pro­duc­tive years,” Rodanakis reported.

“All the olive oil of Sitia is extra vir­gin of excel­lent qual­ity bear­ing a PDO label,” he added. ​“We export our EVOO to France and Eastern Europe, mostly Russia, but unfor­tu­nately prices at ori­gin are cur­rently below €3 per kilo now. We have seen, how­ever, that mar­kets of Eastern Europe ask for more olive oil and they are likely to sur­pass tra­di­tional mar­kets.”

Other parts of the island are not see­ing the high qual­ity reported in Sitia. In some areas, early-har­vested olives gave oil of very low acid­ity but with other char­ac­ter­is­tics dimin­ished, as other Cretan pro­duc­ers pointed out.

“The olive oil pro­duced in October did not have the aro­mas or the per­for­mance of the November olive oil,” said Vaggelis Protogerakis, head of the pro­duc­ers asso­ci­a­tion of Heraklion.

“Unfortunately we did not do as expected because October and November had dif­fer­ent weather con­di­tions com­pared to the pre­vi­ous sea­son,” he added. The [olive oil] qual­i­ties of October were not so good. Importers did not like the olive oils they tasted. And, for the most part, not even the [chem­i­cal] analy­ses revealed a qual­ity prod­uct.”

Priamos Ieronymakis, the head of the wine and olive oil pro­duc­ers asso­ci­a­tion of Crete, argued that early har­vest is not a panacea and pro­duc­ers should decide when to pick their olives.

“Agourelio (early-har­vested olive oil) can be a great prod­uct, pro­vided there is a good plan­ning and that we put for­ward the quan­ti­ties the mar­ket wants,” he said.

“If a fruit is ready [for har­vest] the pro­ducer knows and can judge after years of expe­ri­ence,” he added. ​“This sea­son, many pro­duc­ers fol­lowed the advice of experts and har­vested too soon fear­ing the fruit fly, with­out rely­ing on their expe­ri­ence and check­ing their olives.”

In the weath­ered island of Lesvos in the Aegean, which has suf­fered con­sec­u­tive prob­lem­atic har­vest sea­sons mainly due to adverse weather fluc­tu­a­tions, a local mill owner and exporter Michalis Tzortzis is con­tin­u­ing to process olives amid snow­fall.

“It is snow­ing these days in Lesvos, and we have not yet wrapped up oper­a­tions for the sea­son,” Tzortzis told Olive Oil Times.

The snow was the least of his prob­lems, Tzortzis noted, as the pan­demic has had a sig­nif­i­cant effect on the cur­rent sea­son.

“We are under a strict lock­down here and we have to stop work­ing at 6 p.m. and return tomor­row morn­ing to con­tinue, some­thing that dis­rupts our pro­duc­tion” he said. ​“The weather was very dry this year and It is an aver­age sea­son in terms of quan­tity. The qual­ity of the olive oil, on the other hand, is really great with more extra vir­gin pro­duced than pre­vi­ous years.”

Tzortzis also bemoaned what he called a lack of con­ti­nu­ity in the local farm­ing sec­tor — a long-term prob­lem he con­sid­ers to be a threat to the olive oil indus­try of the island.

“Young peo­ple here do not become farm­ers, not because they are afraid of hard work, but because the income is low and not secured,” he said. ​“This cre­ates a more and more aging farm­ing pop­u­la­tion on the island and could ulti­mately put in peril our agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion includ­ing olive oil.”

In terms of prices, Lesvos appears to be the excep­tion with extra vir­gin sell­ing higher com­pared to other ter­ri­to­ries of the coun­try, as Tzortzis and other pro­duc­ers said.

“Prices at ori­gin are cur­rently above €3 per kilo on the island, which is good for pro­duc­ers but not so good for exporters who can­not com­pete against cheaper olive oils in inter­na­tional mar­kets,” Tzortzis said.

“We export to 14 coun­tries in Europe, how­ever, we see that the finan­cial sit­u­a­tion of buy­ers is not what it used to be. Consumers have become cau­tious and selec­tive and they think twice before buy­ing.”

Another olive oil pro­fes­sional from Lesvos, bot­tler Haralambos Papadellis, said that the prices of olive oil on the island are higher than else­where in Greece.

“Extra vir­gin is being bought at ​‘Spanish’ prices of €3 per kilo, and in some cases for even more,“Papadellis said. ​“These prices are much higher than the pre­vail­ing prices in the Greek mar­ket. In gen­eral, prices are bet­ter com­pared to last year in all the vir­gin olive oils and lam­pante oil.”

In other ter­ri­to­ries of the coun­try, there were no sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems related to the fruit fly, and the olive oil is of high qual­ity. But here was reduced vol­ume, like in the Ilia region where 25,000 tons are expected com­pared to 30,000 tons in good years.

Estimates for the neigh­bor­ing Messinia, in con­trast, pre­dict a strong yield sim­i­lar to quan­ti­ties of pros­per­ous sea­sons of around 50,000 tons of olive oil.

What remains for Greek pro­duc­ers and exporters is the con­tin­u­ing impact of the pan­demic and the long-last­ing clo­sures that affect the whole sec­tor.

“If it were not for the pan­demic and the var­i­ous lock­downs and busi­ness clo­sures it has caused, demand and prices for Greek olive oil would have been much bet­ter,” Manos Rodanakis of Nutricreta said.

• European Commission
• Patris
• Sto Nisi