`EU Olive Oil Production Estimates Released - Olive Oil Times

EU Olive Oil Production Estimates Released

By Costas Vasilopoulos
May. 1, 2020 09:58 UTC

The European Union released its monthly olive oil pro­duc­tion esti­mates and total quan­ti­ties pro­duced so far, with Spain in the lead but falling behind last year’s record har­vest and sub­stan­tial out­puts deliv­ered by Italy, Greece and Portugal.

Spain again tops the list of EU olive oil pro­duc­ers, hav­ing pro­duced a total of 1,116,171 tons by the end of March. The over­all yield of the sea­son is expected to reach 1,120,000 tons, sig­nif­i­cantly reduced as pre­dicted com­pared with the all-time high yield of 1.77 mil­lion tons of olive oil in the pre­vi­ous crop year.

Italy has more than dou­bled its out­put this sea­son, reach­ing an esti­mated aggre­gate quan­tity of 361,145 tons in March. The over­all yield is expected to reach a total of 364,000 tons com­pared with only 175,000 tons deliv­ered in the 2018/19 sea­son.

In Greece, 262,570 tons of olive oil had been pro­duced by the end of March with an expected over­all total of 265,000 tons, a quan­tity some­what lower than the ini­tial expec­ta­tions of 280,000 to 300,000 tons, but sub­stan­tially improved com­pared with the dis­mal past sea­son when only 185,000 tons of olive oil were deliv­ered.

Portugal ranks fourth among the EU’s mem­ber states with an esti­mated near-record pro­duc­tion of 130,000 tons com­pared to 100,000 tons in the cam­paign of 2018/19. The smaller pro­duc­ers Cyprus and France reached a total of 6,991 tons and 5,900 tons of olive oil respec­tively in the cur­rent crop year.

In terms of olive oil con­sump­tion, Spain is expected to use 550,000 tons for domes­tic pur­poses, whereas 510,000 tons of olive oil are esti­mated to be con­sumed in Italy. Greece and Portugal will likely con­sume 125,000 tons and 80,000 tons dur­ing the cur­rent sea­son.

The EU also reported on the final stock esti­mates after milling oper­a­tions are com­pleted for the cur­rent crop year, with the stock of Spain reach­ing 600,700 tons and olive oil reserves of Italy and Greece reach­ing 50,000 and 62,700 tons respec­tively.

By February, another 213,500 tons of olive oil had been with­drawn from the European mar­ket to be stored for a max­i­mum period of six months under the pri­vate stor­age aid scheme applied by the European Commission to help rebal­ance prices.

On top of that, the European farm­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion Copa-Cogeca has warned that the decel­er­a­tion of exports due to the coro­n­avirus trans­port restric­tions could ren­der more quan­ti­ties of prod­ucts like wine and olive oil idle ahead of the next mar­ket­ing sea­son.



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