Apulian Producers Call for More Government Support for Olive Oil Sector

Olive oil pro­duc­tion in Puglia has grown by 21 per­cent over the past decade despite a seem­ingly end­less bar­rage of chal­lenges.

Still, farm­ers in the south­west­ern Italian region, which accounts for more than half of Italy’s over­all pro­duc­tion, believe they would have fared much bet­ter if local and national author­i­ties had imple­mented a wide and thought­ful strate­gic vision for the devel­op­ment of the sec­tor.

To that end, grow­ers and pro­ducer asso­ci­a­tions are call­ing for a new coor­di­nated National Olive Plan.

In a press release, the farm­ers asso­ci­a­tion, Coldiretti high­lighted how a com­pre­hen­sive strat­egy has helped Spanish pro­duc­ers to bet­ter face the many chal­lenges of a chang­ing mar­ket.

Spain’s newly-enacted olive oil stor­age poli­cies and their coor­di­nated pro­mo­tional cam­paigns were cited as exam­ples of what Italy could be doing bet­ter.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture recently pro­vided €5 mil­lion of relief to local grow­ers to cover inter­est pay­ments on loans granted before the end of 2018.

“That is good news,” said Savino Muraglia, pres­i­dent of Coldiretti Puglia. ​“But we still need a coor­di­nated strat­egy for the ren­o­va­tion of the olive and olive oil sec­tor. We need a long-term plan to bet­ter face the fre­quent crises in the olive and olive oil mar­kets.”

While announc­ing the lat­est relief funds, the min­istry also acknowl­edged the need to ​“relaunch pro­duc­tiv­ity and com­pet­i­tive­ness” within the sec­tor by ​“sim­pli­fy­ing pro­ce­dures and reduc­ing bureau­cracy.”

“We need to review the rela­tion­ships within the pro­duc­tion chain, involv­ing first of all the big­ger food retail­ers, because it is unac­cept­able to see extra vir­gin olive oil bot­tles sold on their shelves for €3.00,” Muraglia responded.

Coldiretti asked for bet­ter and wider super­vi­sion of the way in which olive oil is sold by retail­ers and mar­keted to con­sumers.

According to Coldiretti, super­mar­kets in Italy employ a num­ber of dif­fer­ent strate­gies in an effort to sell their prod­ucts, which are dif­fi­cult to com­pare with one another and often result in olive oil being sold at prices that are lower than pro­duc­tion costs.

In their release, the farm­ers asso­ci­a­tion asked for a quick imple­men­ta­tion of the new European rules against unfair mar­ket prac­tices (E.U. direc­tive 2019/633) by Italy in order ​“to pre­vent imported prod­ucts from being sold as prod­ucts of Italian ori­gin.”

Coldiretti said that the European direc­tive could also help ​“to re-estab­lish fair con­tracts along the food chain and to pun­ish prac­tices that mostly dam­age the pro­duc­ers.”

“It is almost impos­si­ble to detect the true ori­gin of the olives on the bot­tles of extra vir­gin olive oil derived from for­eign farms, labels that are required by law,” Coldiretti said.

Those labels are used for the sale of three dif­fer­ent kinds of olive oil blends: blends from E.U. olives, blends from non‑E.U. olives or blends of E.U. and non‑E.U. olives.

“Those labels are writ­ten with very small fonts and are placed on the rear of the bot­tle, a posi­tion that makes them not eas­ily seen,” Coldiretti said. ​“Moreover, bot­tles with extra vir­gin obtained from for­eign olives are often sold with Italian brands and with great evi­dence of decep­tive images, phrases or names that recall the Italian spirit.”

“Consumers should shop with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass in order to be able to make an informed choice,” the asso­ci­a­tion added.

Muraglia empha­sized that in spite of the sig­nif­i­cant pro­duc­tion decreases expe­ri­enced by pro­duc­ers in Puglia, in which the olive yields fell to 101,000 tons, olive oil prices were unaf­fected.

“This sec­tor has seen its value grow from last year, up to €650 mil­lion, a sec­tor which is among the most resilient in the cur­rent pan­demic,” he said. ​“A small reduc­tion, 0.5 per­cent, hit inter­na­tional exports in the first nine months of 2020, when the strongest demand for bot­tled olive oil came mostly from the United States (+28 per­cent) and France (+42 per­cent).”

Once again, the farm­ers have asked for infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion cam­paigns, both at the regional and national lev­els, to strate­gi­cally pro­mote extra vir­gin olive oil.

According to Coldirertti, Italy remains the largest con­sumer of olive oil, with an annual aver­age of 504,000 tons in the last five years, fol­lowed by Spain with 483,000 tons and the United States with 320,000 tons.

• Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestries
• Coldiretti Puglia
• Bari Today