Croatia Wants Its Olive Farmers to Organize

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The Croatian agri­cul­ture min­is­ter, Marija Vučković, has announced that the Ministry is work­ing on changes in the bylaws that apply to pro­ducer orga­ni­za­tions.

The goal of the changes is to encour­age farm­ers and pro­duc­ers to cre­ate sec­tor orga­ni­za­tions which, the min­is­ter believes, would help growth and devel­op­ment by allow­ing mem­bers to ben­e­fit from finan­cial sup­port and other mea­sures, and guide them in prepa­ra­tion for ten­ders con­nected to the E.U.‘s Rural Development Program.

While in the E.U. olive farm­ers’ groups were impor­tant in the devel­op­ment of the sec­tor, Croatian olive pro­duc­ers have tra­di­tion­ally resisted orga­niz­ing, and pre­vi­ous attempts to change the sit­u­a­tion have yielded few results.

The rea­sons seem to be the small size of an aver­age pro­ducer and an unwill­ing­ness to team up, lead­ing to a lack of sup­port from the local or national gov­ern­ment.

The exist­ing cri­te­ria for form­ing agri­cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions have been hard for olive farm­ers to meet. There needs to be a min­i­mum of seven mem­bers, 150 hectares of land, 50 tons of pro­duced oil or 3 mil­lion Croatian Kuna ($437,802) of annual sales income. Seventy-five per­cent of a far­m’s pro­duc­tion needs to go through the orga­ni­za­tion.

Croatian olive farm­ers usu­ally own rel­a­tively small pieces of land and keep a sig­nif­i­cant part of the pro­duced oil for per­sonal con­sump­tion.

There has never been a nation-wide asso­ci­a­tion of olive farm­ers that rep­re­sented their needs, and that has led for­mer agri­cul­ture min­is­ters to, at var­i­ous times, char­ac­ter­ize the olive sec­tor as unim­por­tant, accord­ing to Agrobiz.

As the new code of orga­ni­za­tions is being pre­pared, olive oil pro­duc­ers take dif­fer­ent views of what it can do for them.

Radoslav Bobanović, the direc­tor of a coop­er­a­tive, is opti­mistic. ​“I salute the efforts and the fact that the leg­is­la­ture is work­ing on chang­ing the Code. The admin­is­tra­tion is slow, and the pre­vi­ous con­di­tions were too hard for most pro­duc­ers to meet. But new con­di­tions will be more flex­i­ble,” he said.

Tomislav Najev, an owner of a fam­ily farm, on the other hand, is skep­ti­cal.

“I am not an opti­mist when it comes to this. At the age of 54, I count myself among the older olive oil pro­duc­ers, and they have had bad expe­ri­ences with coop­er­a­tives in the past. First, they were forced into coops, and then most of them went bank­rupt, and those that are left are strug­gling finan­cially,” said Najev.

“I don’t think olive oil pro­duc­ers are inter­ested in orga­niz­ing. We don’t care, the sys­tem works as it is,” he added. ​“Oil pro­duc­ers get small but depend­able finan­cial back­ing from the gov­ern­ment, which is exempt from taxes. There are no oblig­a­tions and no con­trol. We have also estab­lished good sales chan­nels.”

Bobanović argued there is an untapped poten­tial in the col­lec­tive strength of the coun­try’s smaller pro­duc­ers.

“There are cur­rently 10 mil­lion olive trees in Croatia, but I believe there is room for 20 mil­lion more, and the pro­duc­tion is bou­tique — not indus­trial. Istria could form one orga­ni­za­tion — in Dalmatia, there could be three or four orga­ni­za­tions — and each island forms a sep­a­rate orga­ni­za­tion. They could pool their resources, buy equip­ment, trac­tors, an olive mill. They could brand them­selves, and meet E.U. stan­dards.”

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