Pandemic and Weather Extremes Compound an Off-Year in Turkey

Bad springtime weather and logistic challenges have made what was expected to be a tough year even worse.
Mavras Olive Oil Company (Photo by Mehmet Taki)
By Daniel Dawson
Dec. 14, 2020 11:35 UTC

As the 2020 olive har­vest comes to a close, Turkish olive oil pro­duc­tion is expected to reach between 180,000 and 210,000 tons, accord­ing to esti­mates from Juan Vilar Strategic Consultants and the International Olive Council (IOC). Last year the coun­try pro­duced around 225,000 tons.

Scorching spring­time tem­per­a­tures fol­lowed by heavy rains severely dam­aged the olive crop and once again forced pro­duc­ers to har­vest ear­lier than nor­mal.

Just like any other indus­try, the Covid-19 pan­demic had an impact on our har­vest, espe­cially in the pro­duc­tion and organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion processes.- Merve Doran, founder, Oleamea

The Covid-19 pan­demic com­pli­cated the har­vest for some pro­duc­ers, as new san­i­tary and social dis­tanc­ing mea­sures were intro­duced in groves and mills and local cur­fews came into effect.

This year has been excep­tion­ally chal­leng­ing due to cli­mate change and the pan­demic,” Ahat Caskurlu, the co-founder of Zeytín Oil, told Olive Oil Times. We not only had to maneu­ver around Covid-19 pro­tec­tion mea­sures like increased social dis­tanc­ing dur­ing pro­duc­tion and work­ing around local cur­few hours, but also had a major neg­a­tive impact from the heat­waves we faced last May.”

Caskurlu expects to pro­duce 25 tons of olive oil this year from his groves in Canakkale, at the very north­ern tip of the Anatolian penin­sula, and Aydin, in the cen­ter. Last year, Zeytín Oil pro­duced more than 30 tons.

Our olive flow­ers were severely dam­aged with the heat­waves and strong rain show­ers hence our yield dropped 20 to 30 per­cent,” he said.

With pre­dic­tions sug­gest­ing a yield up to 20 per­cent lower than last year, Ümmühan Tibet, the chair­woman of the board of Turkey’s National Olive and Olive Oil Council (UZZK), said the dif­fer­ence was mainly due to a major­ity of pro­duc­ers enter­ing the off-year of the olive tree’s alter­nate bear­ing cycle.

However, she acknowl­edged that cli­mate change was also mak­ing the har­vest more chal­leng­ing.

See Also:2020 Harvest Updates

Unfortunately the olive oil pro­duc­tion of the pro­ducer coun­tries has started to fluc­tu­ate much more as a result of global cli­mate change in recent years,” she told Olive Oil Times. We were adversely affected by extreme weather, heat and drought dur­ing the flow­er­ing of the olive tree and fruit growth.”

Tibet still expects pro­duc­tion to con­tinue trend­ing upwards in Turkey as it has over the pre­vi­ous decade. Even in the worst-case sce­nario for this year’s har­vest, pro­duc­tion would be just 10-per­cent below the rolling five year aver­age. In the best case, it would exceed the rolling aver­age by nearly five per­cent.

production-business-asia-pandemic-and-weather-extremes-compound-an-offyear-in-turkey-olive-oil-times

Mehmet Taki

Due to the increase in the num­ber of olive trees every year in our coun­try, our total olive pro­duc­tion is usu­ally between 1.5 mil­lion tons and two mil­lion tons,” Tibet said. Since the con­sump­tion of table olives is tra­di­tion­ally high in our coun­try, we use one-third of our olive fruit pro­duc­tion for table olives.”

As the fruit could not grow due to drought this year, the major­ity of the 1.35 mil­lion tons of fruit pro­duced will be used for olive oil pro­duc­tion,” she added. So we esti­mate nearly 200,000 tons of olive oil pro­duc­tion.”

The vast major­ity of Turkey’s olive oil pro­duc­tion takes place on the broad west­ern tip of the Anatolian penin­sula. Even though nearly 400 kilo­me­ters sep­a­rate the north­ern and south­ern shore­lines, chal­lenges cre­ated by the cli­mate was a con­sis­tent theme among pro­duc­ers.

In the vil­lage of Bozburun, at the very south­ern end of the penin­sula, Mustafa Birhan Hazer lamented the highly volatile tem­per­a­tures that have become increas­ingly fre­quent in the spring and started to coin­cide with the blos­som­ing of the olive flow­ers.

“[This year] is dou­ble last year’s har­vest,” the Bozelli founder told Olive Oil Times. However, this is not great at all. Climate change is prov­ing to be a real chal­lenge for us.”

Birhan Hazer said that he expected to pro­duce about seven tons of olive oil, which was twice as much as last year, but less than the 2018 yield by about one third.

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This year, once again, we had extreme heat over 40 ºC in May for two weeks dur­ing bloom,” he said. And it sud­denly switched to freez­ing tem­per­a­tures for two nights. This of course neg­a­tively impacted our har­vest.”

While Tibet, of the UZZK, attrib­uted the alter­nate bear­ing of the olive trees for the major­ity of this year’s pro­duc­tion decrease, nowhere were the impacts of cli­mate change demon­strated bet­ter than in the groves of Nova Vera.

We were adversely affected by extreme weather, heat and drought dur­ing the flow­er­ing of the olive tree and fruit growth.- Ümmühan Tibe, chair­woman, Turkish National Olive and Olive Oil Council

We have two main cul­ti­vars at our groves which are Ayvalık and Trilye,” Bahar Allan, the owner of Nova Vera, told Olive Oil Times. For the con­ven­tion­ally planted Ayvalık cul­ti­var, peri­od­ic­ity [alter­nate bear­ing] is effec­tive and, because of this, we had a nearly 50-per­cent increase in pro­duc­tion com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year.”

However the major­ity of our pro­duc­tion is com­ing from our high-den­sity planted Trilye cul­ti­var and we had 30-per­cent fewer olives this year,” she added. The rea­son was not peri­od­ic­ity – it was mainly cli­mate change caus­ing heavy rains dur­ing the flow­er­ing period and drought.”

In spite of the cli­matic set­backs, Allan said she expects to pro­duce 90 tons of olive oil this year, up from the 70 tons pro­duced by Nova Vera last year.

See Also:The Best Olive Oils from Turkey

While the cli­mate of the Anatolian penin­sula is expected to grad­u­ally become hot­ter and drier, the impacts of the Covid-19 pan­demic have been more imme­di­ate.

Producers told Olive Oil Times that the pan­demic has sig­nif­i­cantly changed how they are doing busi­ness. These changes ranged from com­pli­cat­ing the logis­tics process of the har­vest to a small boom in online sales.

Just like any other indus­try, the Covid-19 pan­demic had an impact on our har­vest, espe­cially in the pro­duc­tion and organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion processes,” Merve Doran, the founder and co-owner of Oleamea, told Olive Oil Times.

We had a case in which one of our mechanist’s fam­ily mem­bers tested pos­i­tive, so we had to work with one mech­a­nist for two-plus weeks,” he added. Also, we had to post­pone the fac­tory inspec­tion, which is part of the organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process, twice due to pos­i­tive cases within the com­pany that does the inspec­tion. This has post­poned their deliv­ery date for the organic cer­tifi­cate.”

Doran expects to pro­duce between 90 and 100 tons of olive oil this year, which is more than the com­pany pro­duced last year. He attrib­uted that increase to Oleamea’s new export con­tracts and grow­ing demand for olive oil in the United States.

production-business-asia-pandemic-and-weather-extremes-compound-an-offyear-in-turkey-olive-oil-times

Allan, of Nova Vera, added that the pan­demic had increased her pro­duc­tion costs, but also boosted online sales.

We had many dif­fi­cul­ties estab­lish­ing our har­vest­ing teams and also for their trans­fers from and to the groves,” she said. Our man-hour costs have increased nearly 20 per­cent.”

Furthermore, cafes and restau­rants are one of our major sales chan­nels and their olive oil con­sump­tion has decreased almost 50 per­cent, mainly because of lim­i­ta­tions and lock­down,” she added. However, our direct sales via the inter­net have con­sid­er­ably increased and com­pen­sated this neg­a­tive impact.”

Burgeoning online sales were a con­sis­tent theme among pro­duc­ers dis­cussing the impacts of the coro­n­avirus. Tibet, of the UZZK, said that the pan­demic was chang­ing people’s eat­ing habits.

The cur­few and quar­an­tine imposed due to the pan­demic have changed the way of life of many of us, affected our eat­ing habits, and our habit of eat­ing out has been replaced by eat­ing at home,” she said. Turkish peo­ple started to con­sume more table olives and olive oil con­sump­tion increased by 25 per­cent in our coun­try dur­ing this period.”

Over the past decade, olive oil con­sump­tion in Turkey has steadily trended upwards. Even as the hos­pi­tal­ity and restau­rant sec­tor has suf­fered as a result of the pan­demic, pro­duc­ers are hope­ful that domes­tic con­sump­tion can fill the gap and fuel fur­ther increases.

This year’s har­vest is one of the bet­ter years,” said Mehmet Taki, the co-owner of Bata Tarim ve Gida Urunleri, which pro­duced about 26 tons of olive oil in spite of a dry sum­mer and autumn as well as delays caused by the pan­demic.

Our sales to hotels and restau­rants dropped by almost 70 per­cent,” he said. On the other hand, our direct sales to con­sumers almost dou­bled.”

On aver­age,” he con­cluded, I can’t com­plain.”


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