European Union officials estimate that the nine producing countries of the 27-member bloc will yield 1.5 million tons of olive oil in the 2023-24 crop year.
As a result of another below-average harvest and current market scarcity, olive oil prices are likely to remain high. According to the European Commission’s short term agricultural outlook report, these conditions will significantly impact olive oil consumption in Europe.
If the EU’s estimate comes to fruition, production in the 2023-24 crop year would be 9 percent above the historical low of the previous season, when 1.384 million tons were produced. Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, the EU produced an average of 2.13 million tons of olive oil annually.
Officials in Brussels noted how three of the bloc’s four major olive oil-producing countries faced challenging harvests, with Italy being the exception.
Italian groves benefited from abundant rainfall in the spring, which negatively impacted flowering in several regions but helped sustain olive production in the country’s south. Meanwhile, growers in Spain, Portugal and Greece faced a hot and dry spring.
Summer did not go much better in Spain and Portugal, as the effects of some rainfall were curtailed by heatwaves and conditions favoring olive fruit fly and pest infections.
The EU expects Greece’s olive oil yield to drop 20 percent in the 2023-24 crop year as the country enters an ‘off-year’ in the alternate bearing cycle of the olive trees. More