Recent News

Twenty-five mills in China man­aged to pro­duce 5,000 tons of olive oil this year accord­ing to the International Olive Council citing offi­cial sources, a 75 per­cent increase over the pre­vi­ous season.

Olive oil pro­duc­tion in the world’s most pop­u­lous coun­try employed approx­i­mately 15,000 people, mostly in the Gansu, Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces. The amount of land devoted to olive pro­duc­tion was reported to amount to 86,000 hectares.

Domestic pro­duc­tion rep­re­sents about 12 per­cent of the coun­try’s cur­rent needs, with imports last year close to 36,000 tons, the IOC said in its August newslet­ter. Most of the imports were from Spain (81 per­cent), fol­lowed and Italy (13 per­cent).

Olive oil con­sump­tion in China remains exceed­ingly small com­pared to other major mar­kets like the United States, for exam­ple, which imports 10 times as much olive oil from abroad.

In other IOC news, Tunisia became the first coun­try to exe­cute the new International Agreement on Olive Oil and Table Olives, an unsur­pris­ing devel­op­ment fol­low­ing the recent elec­tion of Tunisian Abdellatif Ghedira as the IOC’s exec­u­tive direc­tor.

• IOC August Newsletter