`Olive Oil Production in Spain Expected to Fall, Officials Say - Olive Oil Times
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Olive Oil Production in Spain Expected to Fall, Officials Say

By Costas Vasilopoulos
Oct. 19, 2021 12:37 UTC

Producers in Spain expect a lower olive oil yield in the 2021/22 crop year than they har­vested in 2020/21, data pre­sented by offi­cials at Expoliva 2021 indi­cate.

The decrease in the coun­try’s pro­duc­tion is due to the reduced out­put of olive oil pro­jected for Andalusia, the barom­e­ter of the Spanish olive oil indus­try account­ing for almost 80 per­cent of Spain’s yield.

See Also:2021 Harvest Updates

According to Carmen Crespo, the Andalusian min­is­ter of agri­cul­ture, fish­eries and rural devel­op­ment, pro­duc­ers in the autonomous com­mu­nity expect to yield around 1,050,300 tons of olive oil in the cur­rent sea­son.

The amount trans­lates to a decrease of 5.5 per­cent com­pared to the 2020/21 crop year and a reduc­tion of 4.5 per­cent com­pared with the rolling five-year aver­age.

The esti­mates lead to a total vol­ume of around 1.3 mil­lion tons of olive oil for the whole coun­try in the cur­rent crop year, slightly below the rolling five-year aver­age of 1.4 mil­lion tons.

Olive oil con­sump­tion in the coun­try, on the other hand, reached 412,000 tons in 2020, an increase of 16 per­cent com­pared to 2019, the min­is­ter added, with ​“the most sig­nif­i­cant increase” of 19 per­cent recorded for extra vir­gin olive oil.

Crespo also high­lighted the chal­lenges that Andalusian farm­ers face, mainly due to the unpre­dictable weather.

“We are in a time espe­cially con­di­tioned by the weather,” she said, adding that high tem­per­a­tures, as well as ​“the short­age of rain, espe­cially in spring, and after an agri­cul­tural year with an appre­cia­ble water deficit, are reflected in the olive grove.”

The Spanish Association of Olive Municipalities (AEMO) also antic­i­pated a mediocre har­vest and stressed that the stock of olive oil from the pre­vi­ous crop year was lower than usual.

“The cur­rent stock amounts to just 400,000 tons, a quan­tity sig­nif­i­cantly lower than last year, which cov­ers only two and a half months of trad­ing,” the asso­ci­a­tion said in a state­ment. ​“We are ulti­mately fac­ing a sea­son with mod­er­ate pro­duc­tion, start­ing with a much lower stock.”

However, olive oil prices are expected to remain unaf­fected by the change in pro­duc­tion, the asso­ci­a­tion fur­ther noted.

“What is cer­tain is that there is absolutely no sig­nal that would make us pre­dict a drop in prices for the next few months,” AEMO added. ​“We, there­fore, pre­dict sta­ble and strong prices, not only for this entire cam­paign but prob­a­bly also for the next. All this depends, of course, on the evo­lu­tion of the cli­mate.”

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