Olive Production Center of Gravity Moves Eastward

The 2022 olive har­vest is in full swing in the north­ern hemi­sphere and has been full of sur­prises.

Western European and North African coun­tries that suf­fered from record-break­ing droughts and swel­ter­ing heat­waves all have reported sub­stan­tial pro­duc­tion declines.

Meanwhile, pro­duc­ers in the Middle East are report­ing record-high or near-record har­vests, par­tially attrib­uted to plen­ti­ful rain­fall at timely moments dur­ing olive tree devel­op­ment and mild spring and autumn tem­per­a­tures.

Easily the biggest sur­prises of the har­vest come from Turkey and Spain. Officials antic­i­pate a record-smash­ing 400,000-ton har­vest in the for­mer, while the lat­ter is set for its low­est har­vest in nearly a decade.

Along with eclips­ing pre­vi­ous records, this har­vest tem­porar­ily places Turkey as the sec­ond-largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­try behind Spain.

However, Turkey is far from the only coun­try in the Eastern Mediterranean antic­i­pat­ing a bumper crop. Producers in Greece, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria expect boun­ti­ful har­vests.

Conversely, on the west­ern end of the basin, pro­duc­ers in Algeria, France, Italy, Morocco, Portugal and Tunisia are sim­i­larly brac­ing for poor har­vests.

Harvest esti­mates for the 2022/23 crop year ana­lyzed by Olive Oil Times indi­cate that pro­duc­tion in the Western Mediterranean will be sig­nif­i­cantly lower than last year and well below the rolling five-year aver­age.

Olive Oil Times esti­mates that these six coun­tries in the Western Mediterranean might com­bine to pro­duce 1.46 mil­lion tons of olive oil this year, well below the 2.32 mil­lion tons pro­duced by the same bloc in 2021/22 and the 2.27-million-ton rolling five-year aver­age.

On the other hand, five coun­tries in the Eastern Mediterranean – Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria (the lat­est fig­ures for Israel and Palestine were unavail­able at the time of writ­ing) – might com­bine to pro­duce 881,000 tons in the cur­rent crop year.

Conversely, this fig­ure sig­nif­i­cantly exceeds the 602,000 tons pro­duced in the last crop year and the rolling five-year aver­age of 648,300 tons.

While it may be tempt­ing to con­clude that the cen­ter of grav­ity in the olive-grow­ing world is mov­ing east, the real­ity is a bit more com­plex.

Experts who mon­i­tor global olive oil pro­duc­tion believe that this year’s bumper crops across the Eastern Mediterranean and the sub­stan­tial drop in the west is par­tially coin­ci­den­tal and partly the result of this year’s unusual cli­mate.

The mild and wet weather in the Eastern Mediterranean that many grow­ers credit with help­ing olive trees pro­duce abun­dant fruit is widely con­sid­ered an anom­aly. Overall, the aver­age annual tem­per­a­ture in the Middle East is ris­ing twice as fast as the global aver­age.

According to research from the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Development (ENEA), a 1.8 ºC increase in aver­age global tem­per­a­tures above the pre-indus­trial aver­age would result in sub­stan­tial decreases in Middle Eastern and North African olive pro­duc­tion from 2041 to 2050 rel­a­tive to the 1961 to 1970 aver­age.

On the other hand, pro­duc­tion in Turkey and Europe would be far less affected, with some coun­tries pro­jected to expe­ri­ence steady pro­duc­tion or even slight increases based on a 1.8 ºC tem­per­a­ture rise sce­nario.

Water stress is also expected to become worse across the Middle East. According to the World Resources Institute, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan are among the six most water-stressed coun­tries and states on Earth.

Many other major Mediterranean olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­tries are also expected to expe­ri­ence high, though less extreme, lev­els of water stress.

While olive oil pro­duc­tion in Israel, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria is likely to regress to the mean next year when a num­ber of the olive groves in these coun­tries enter an ​‘off-year’ in the alter­nate bear­ing cycle of the olive tree, Turkey will likely sus­tain its upward pro­duc­tion trend.

Experts par­tially attrib­uted the country’s record-break­ing har­vest to sus­tained efforts to plant 68 to 96 mil­lion trees since 2007. This year was the first in which many of these trees entered matu­rity.

In the Western Mediterranean, tem­per­a­tures also are expected to rise faster than the global aver­age.

Exorbitantly high tem­per­a­tures across Western Mediterranean olive groves in May and June dam­aged some trees dur­ing the blos­som­ing phase, result­ing in lower fruition lev­els.

The hot spring was fol­lowed by sus­tained drought. Europe expe­ri­enced its most severe drought of the past 500 years. Growers in North Africa expe­ri­enced a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion.

Furthermore, water short­ages com­pounded the impacts of the drought and forced many trees to drop or des­ic­cate their olives to save water.

However, mete­o­rol­o­gists at AccuWeather, a weather data and tech­nol­ogy com­pany, pre­dicted that Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and the Balkan Peninsula would all receive plenty of rain and snow this win­ter.

While the pre­cip­i­ta­tion is unlikely to elim­i­nate the water deficits cre­ated by the drought, olive trees and grow­ers may be in a bet­ter posi­tion to cope with another hot and dry sum­mer than they were after the abnor­mally dry win­ter and spring expe­ri­enced this year.

Away from the cli­mate, the type of olive groves pre­dom­i­nant in each coun­try is also expected to impact pro­duc­tion fig­ures.

Western Mediterranean coun­tries, includ­ing Portugal and Algeria, are expected to see pro­duc­tion rise steadily in the long run due to efforts to plant more trees at higher den­si­ties.

High-den­sity (inten­sive) and super-high-den­sity (super-inten­sive) olive groves lower pro­duc­tion costs and, when man­aged well, mit­i­gate the impacts of the nat­ural alter­nate bear­ing cycle of the olive tree due to con­sis­tent prun­ing and a steady stream of fer­ti­ga­tion at the most crit­i­cal points in tree and drupe devel­op­ment.

As a result, coun­tries with higher per­cent­ages of these groves are likely to see steady pro­duc­tion increases with fewer cli­mate-related dips and lim­ited effects from ​‘off-years.’

The afore­men­tioned ENEA research also indi­cated that coun­tries with high-den­sity and super-high-den­sity olive groves would see lim­ited pro­duc­tion decreases or even mod­est increases with 1.8 ºC of warm­ing.

Production will likely con­tinue to rise steadily in many Western Mediterranean coun­tries where these types of olive groves are more com­mon.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey and Egypt (where har­vest data was also unavail­able for 2022) are the main coun­tries grow­ing olive trees inten­sively on a large scale.

While Turkey is the excep­tion to long-term olive oil pro­duc­tion trends in the Eastern Mediterranean, Italy is sim­i­larly an anom­aly to Westen Mediterranean pro­duc­tion trends.

The unabated spread of Xylella fas­tidiosa, a deadly olive tree bac­te­ria, and a grow­ing empha­sis on qual­ity over quan­tity have changed the country’s fun­da­men­tal pro­duc­tion par­a­digm.

Production is likely to recover from this year’s mea­ger yield but is unlikely to reach the heights of the early 2000s when 600,000 tons of olive oil pro­duc­tion was the norm.

Based on the pre­vail­ing cli­matic and agri­cul­tural trends, the out­sized role of Eastern Mediterranean olive oil pro­duc­tion com­pared to the Western Mediterranean appears to be an anom­aly in 2022/23.

Indeed, some experts antic­i­pate that organic and tra­di­tional olive groves will steadily move north as North Africa and Southern Europe become hot­ter and drier.

With the heads of France’s lead­ing cham­pagne houses buy­ing land in the south of England, it may not be long before lead­ing olive oil pro­duc­ers begin to fol­low suit.