Greek Producers Report Poor Harvest for Quantity, Quality

Summary

The olive oil pro­duc­tion in Greece is expected to be sig­nif­i­cantly lower this year due to adverse weather and fruit fly infes­ta­tions, with esti­mates rang­ing from 200,000 to 240,000 tons com­pared to 350,000 tons in the pre­vi­ous sea­son. Producers in var­i­ous regions, such as Lesvos, Halkidiki, Messinia, Lakonia, and Crete, are report­ing reduced yields, with some fac­ing qual­ity issues that have led to down­grades in clas­si­fi­ca­tion. Despite the chal­lenges, small pro­duc­ers who have focused on qual­ity over quan­tity may have an oppor­tu­nity to shine in this dif­fi­cult sea­son.

With the har­vest­ing sea­son almost at its end in Greece, the uncer­tainty remains about the vol­ume of olive oil pro­duced.

Some indus­try experts expect that the ini­tial pre­dic­tions will be ver­i­fied and the crop will reach 240,000 tons, while oth­ers esti­mate it to be even less and come in at around 200,000 tons.

In any case, the total quan­tity of olive oil will be sig­nif­i­cantly smaller than the 350,000 tons of the pre­vi­ous sea­son.

The major­ity of the olive oil mak­ing ter­ri­to­ries of the coun­try faced sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems with the fruit fly and fluc­tu­a­tions in the weather, which inevitably led to lower pro­duc­tion, both in terms of quan­tity and qual­ity.

The island of Lesvos suf­fered a severe decrease in its olive oil pro­duc­tion, as the mem­bers of the Agricultural Association of Stypsi, in the north of the island, told Olive Oil Times.

“We cul­ti­vate only the Adramytini vari­ety here and due to the many rainy days we had, har­vest­ing is still ongo­ing,” pro­duc­ers said.

“But the fruit fly and even more the change of our micro­cli­mate that brought peri­ods of warm weather when we should have cold weather, seri­ously affected our olive trees and the pro­duced olive oil,” they added.

Their esti­ma­tion of the total pro­duc­tion was dis­ap­point­ing, as it is likely to be only half of last year’s yield.

“We expect to get around 50 per­cent of the pre­vi­ous season’s olive oil in our area with most of it being vir­gin and not extra vir­gin, while the whole island will likely make 4,000 to 5,000 tons com­pared to 12,000 tons deliv­ered the last sea­son,” pro­duc­ers said. ​“So, we will have sig­nif­i­cantly less extra vir­gin to sell as stan­dard­ized extra vir­gin olive oil of Lesvos.”

In Halkidiki, an area well-known for its table olives and also for its early har­vested extra vir­gin olive oil, Ioannis Schinas is the owner of a mill located on the Kassandra penin­sula.

He told Olive Oil Times that the cur­rent har­vest­ing sea­son is far from pros­per­ous, with the quan­tity hav­ing plum­meted as never before.

“Out of four mills located on the Kassandra penin­sula ours was the only one that oper­ated this sea­son,” he said. ​“We man­aged to get only 20 tons of olive oil, while the pre­vi­ous sea­son the over­all pro­duc­tion was 2,000 tons from all the four mills.”

He also stum­bled upon a sit­u­a­tion he had never faced before, with some of his extra vir­gin olive oil being degraded to lam­pante oil when exported to Italy.

“Our tests here clas­si­fied it as extra vir­gin, but the ana­lyt­i­cal tests in Italy clas­si­fied it as lam­pante, not even vir­gin,” Schinas said. ​“This was because of the mag­ni­tude of the dam­age the fruit fly had caused that ren­dered some of our extra vir­gin to be of lower qual­ity, some­thing that the ini­tial tests had failed to pin­point. I know that this has hap­pened to many other pro­duc­ers and mill own­ers in the coun­try.”

Iohannis Kampouris, a pro­ducer and exporter of olive oil based near ancient Mycenae, pointed out the usual sus­pects for the reduced crop this sea­son.

“The adverse weather and the fruit fly affected the olive oil crop in the whole coun­try. Our olive groves in Korinthia, Lakonia, and Lamia show a reduc­tion in their out­put by 35 to 45 per­cent com­pared to last sea­son,” he said.

But despite the grim sit­u­a­tion, he iden­ti­fied an oppor­tu­nity that might exist for small pro­duc­ers to stand out.

“The pro­duc­ers who devoted time to cater to their groves and exe­cuted pre­cise crop-dust­ing oper­a­tions received olive oils of high qual­ity, pro­vided that har­vest and pro­cess­ing of the olives occurred on time,” he said. ​“So, instead of the usual mass pro­duc­tion, small pro­duc­ers will be able to demon­strate their qual­ity prod­ucts.”

Several other ter­ri­to­ries of Greece are expected to have lower olive oil yields this year as well.

In Messinia, one of the most boun­ti­ful areas of the coun­try, the pro­duc­tion is cal­cu­lated at only 38,000 tons with 75 per­cent of it being extra vir­gin olive oil. The har­vest of the whole region usu­ally exceeds 50,000 tons of top-qual­ity olive oil.

In the neigh­bor­ing region of Lakonia, the over­all yield is expected to be less than half of the usual 25,000 tons of olive oil.

In Crete, which nor­mally makes up one-third of the coun­try’s total olive oil pro­duc­tion, the yield is esti­mated at roughly 60,000 tons com­pared to 85,000 tons in the pre­vi­ous sea­son.

In the mean­time, some mem­bers of par­lia­ment urged the Ministry of Agriculture to pro­vide com­pen­sa­tion for affected olive oil pro­duc­ers by employ­ing the so-called ​‘de min­imis’ aid funds of the European Commission.

The min­istry replied that most of the avail­able de min­imis funds have already been allo­cated to other sec­tors, and there was no com­mit­ment for hand­outs any time soon.

• Agrotypos
• Anatolh


• Sedik