Turkish Olive Oil Exports Can Make Up for Europe's Deficit Once Ban Is Lifted, Official Says

Bulk olive oil exports from Turkey were sched­uled to resume on November 1^st. However, the Ministry of Commerce extended the July 2023 ban indef­i­nitely in mid-October, cit­ing high olive oil prices.

Despite the added uncer­tainty, offi­cials from the country’s national olive oil asso­ci­a­tion expect Turkey to play a sig­nif­i­cant role in sup­ply­ing olive oil to European mar­kets as the 2023/24 crop year pro­gresses.

“Last year, Turkey broke a his­tor­i­cal record by pro­duc­ing 421,000 tons of olive oil,” Mustafa Tan, the pres­i­dent of the National Olive and Olive Oil Council, told Olive Oil Times. ​“This made our coun­try the sec­ond-largest pro­ducer of olive oil in the world.”

While this year’s har­vest is expected to fall sig­nif­i­cantly, with the ini­tial esti­mate that pro­duc­tion will reach just 180,000 tons, Tan indi­cated the country’s olive oil stocks com­bined with the new pro­duc­tion would be enough to meet domes­tic demand and resume bulk exports.

“This year, after exclud­ing the record export amount of 150,000 tons and the same amount of domes­tic con­sump­tion, we have an end-of-period car­ry­over stock of around 180,000 tons,” he said.

“This amount enables more exports and domes­tic con­sump­tion than last year,” Tan added. ​“In other words, Turkey con­tin­ues to be the coun­try with the high­est sup­ply after Spain, with its stock car­ried over from last year and its pro­duc­tion this year.”

Producers in the coun­try said this year’s decline was mainly due to many of the country’s groves enter­ing an ​‘off-year’ in the nat­ural alter­nate bear­ing cycle for the olive tree and some dam­age caused by extreme weather events.

While the National Olive and Olive Oil Council did not pub­lish its offi­cial har­vest fore­casts until September, grow­ers and pro­duc­ers saw evi­dence of a poor har­vest by early July.

Expectations of an unprece­dented sit­u­a­tion in which global olive oil pro­duc­tion declined for a sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year, paired with already his­tor­i­cally high prices, led to the Turkish gov­ern­ment imple­ment­ing the bulk ban – indi­vid­u­ally pack­aged exports are still per­mit­ted – which has been met with dis­may by some pro­duc­ers and exporters.

However, Turkey has a his­tory of olive oil export bans, with the lat­est pro­hi­bi­tion being the third one in as many years.

In April 2021, the country’s trade min­istry imposed a five-month ban on bulk exports, cit­ing uncer­tainty caused by the unfurl­ing Covid-19 pan­demic.

The fol­low­ing April, the min­istry pro­hib­ited bulk exports again due to con­cerns about short­ages in the coun­try and sky­rock­et­ing infla­tion. The ban remained in place until the end of the year.

As a result, offi­cials are con­fi­dent this ban will not extend beyond the end of the cur­rent har­vest, espe­cially if rain falls across the Mediterranean this win­ter and spring, which would bode well for the 2024/25 crop year.

“Turkey will con­tinue to con­tribute to the sup­ply short­age that will arise from the ongo­ing low yields in other olive-grow­ing coun­tries, espe­cially in pack­aged prod­ucts, as it did last year,” Tan con­cluded.

• Mundus Agri