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“My best com­pli­ments and wishes go to the win­ners of the pres­ti­gious NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition,” the Italian Agricultural Undersecretary Giuseppe L’Abbate wrote this week in a note to Olive Oil Times.

“They keep the Italian flag high, and my thoughts go to them when I plan the actions to be car­ried out to enhance the Italian qual­ity pro­duc­tions,” he wrote.

Olive oil pro­duc­ers from Italy have led the NYIOOC awards tally every year except 2015 (known by some farm­ers as Annus Horribilis — the hor­ri­ble year — for its unusu­ally bad mix of envi­ron­men­tal calamities.)

Even with such a strong show­ing on the world stage, the mar­ket forces are stacked against pro­duc­ers of excel­lence who have to com­pete with infe­rior prod­ucts, price wars and con­sumers who know lit­tle about the value of high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oils.

L’Abbate said to improve the prospects for Italy’s mas­ter pro­duc­ers he keeps his focus on three main actions: the ​“fur­ther seg­men­ta­tion of the mar­ket, clar­ity of the sanc­tion­ing frame­work and an ade­quate national sec­tor plan.”

“Taking the exam­ple of the high-qual­ity schemes planned for fresh milk and cooked ham,” L’Abbate said, ​“we should repli­cate the expe­ri­ence and also cre­ate a high-qual­ity scheme for extra vir­gin olive oil, tak­ing into account stricter para­me­ters, in order to reward the efforts of our farm­ers in cre­at­ing excel­lent products.” 

To that end, what is needed is to strengthen and clear up the cur­rent leg­is­la­tion, he added.

“With the draft law on agri-food frauds we’re work­ing on, we intend to pro­vide a revised sanc­tion­ing frame­work for coun­ter­feit­ing in the olive oil sec­tor,” he explained. 

“This mea­sure, that recalls a bill that I cospon­sored, is intended to give fur­ther guar­an­tees to con­sumers and pro­tect qual­ity producers.”

Nonetheless, the will­ing­ness to invest in qual­ity pro­duc­tions should be backed up by a national olive sec­tor plan. ​“Its estab­lish­ment and fund­ing can no longer be deferred,” the under­sec­re­tary wrote. 

“Yet, in addi­tion to aim­ing at ris­ing vol­umes, we should con­tinue to encour­age qual­ity so that our coun­try can main­tain its promi­nent role, which was once again con­firmed by the suc­cess of the Italian pro­duc­ers at the NYIOOC.”