Report: Climate Change Will Dramatically Reduce Tunisian Olive Oil Production

Olive oil pro­duc­tion in Tunisia may fall by 70 per­cent com­pared to the 1981 to 2010 aver­age by the end of the cen­tury, a report from the country’s National Observatory for Agriculture found.

Agricultural offi­cials in Tunisia worry that the unmit­i­gated effects of cli­mate change, includ­ing rapidly ris­ing green­house gas emis­sions, could bring the annual aver­age pro­duc­tion down to 61,000 tons.

By com­par­i­son, Tunisia pro­duced 240,000 tons of olive oil in the 2021/22 crop year, seven per­cent below the rolling five-year aver­age.

However, the report also found that annual pro­duc­tion may fall to just 149,000 tons each year in a sce­nario where appro­pri­ate cli­mate pol­icy allowed CO2 con­cen­tra­tions to remain at a lower level.

The offi­cials wrote annual olive pro­duc­tion was likely to be neg­a­tively affected by bien­nial mild win­ters in all regions of the coun­try. They warned that trees were unlikely to receive the nec­es­sary 300 to 600 chill hours to enable ver­nal­iza­tion.

A sig­nif­i­cant increase in heat­wave days in south­ern and west­ern Tunisia is also pre­dicted to lower olive pro­duc­tion and force new olive groves to be planted far­ther north. Although, the offi­cials also pre­dicted that the north and cen­ter-east of the coun­try would also face fre­quent water deficits.

“Indeed, by 2100, the areas suit­able for olive grow­ing would decrease by an aver­age of 14 per­cent for the RCP8.5 [worst case] sce­nario and by an aver­age of five per­cent for the RCP4.5 [best case] sce­nario,” the offi­cials wrote.

However, the offi­cials acknowl­edged that their pre­dic­tions do not take into account the tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment that may take place in the sec­tor or the abil­ity of olive grow­ers to use new pro­duc­tion meth­ods allow­ing them to increase their yields.

Despite the tem­pered opti­mism offered by the report, the offi­cials warned that Tunisia’s olive oil exports are likely to decrease sig­nif­i­cantly, which would upset the country’s trade bal­ance

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, Tunisia exported $502 mil­lion (€459 mil­lion) of olive oil in 2019, the last year for which data are avail­able. Olive oil exports rep­re­sented slightly more than three per­cent of the country’s exports that year. Olive oil remains Tunisia’s lead­ing agri­cul­tural export.

• Tunisian National Observatory for Agriculture