The Second Report on the Olive Oil Sector, published by the Spanish Coordinating Institute for Governance and Applied Economics, concludes that olive oil needs a single quality standard that erases fraud in its production and marketing, provides added value, and ensures its future.
The Report by the Institute maintains that unification of quality standards is vital to give value to olive oil and to ensure the viability of the entire agricultural, industrial, commercial industries and social context that exists around it.
According to the Institute, "olive oil is a highly regulated product in its different varieties, but it does not have a homogeneous quality standard that allows us to establish what standards the product must overcome and what are the irregular or fraudulent practices that are not admitted. All of this taking into account the technological advances provided by the sector and the progress made in quality and processing, with a wide spectrum of organoleptic elements and varieties of olives that are in the market".
The Institute maintains that, the standardization of quality standards should be extended to the tasting process, essential to determine anomalies or defects that affect the classification of oils and their life in the market.
"The truth is that the lack of unification in the quality standards; and efficient controls are a window through which they can enter practices that are not transparent at all in order to confuse the consumer, damage the image of the product and reduce its value, and favors that in many international markets the olive oil is classified in the generic of fats", the executive vice-president of the Coordinated Institute, Jesús Sánchez Lambás said.
The combination of volatility in prices, the high component of the cost of the raw material in the final product and the different quality regulations, causes that olive oil is a sector that is subject to irregular or unorthodox practices.
Mr Lambás pointed out that "it is imperative to give value to olive oil, since in our first report we pointed out the banalization of the product as an element of maximum risk".
"Now we point out that without a strict quality standard that erases fraud and gives the market confidence in olive oil and everything it represents in Spain, we are condemned to crawl between the consumer's distrust and pay one and carry three, which will carry it to the abyss," he added.