International News/Trends

The price for olive oil has dropped to its lowest level in a decade and farmers in the Middle East are bearing the brunt as Spain and Italy dump their government-subsidised stocks at below cost. “The international market prices are going below sustainable levels,” Nasser Abu Farha, the director of Canaan Fair Trade that works with some 1,500 Palestinian farmers, told The Media Line.

Congratulations to Fair Go this week for a thorough, no-nonsense comparison of New Zealand extra virgin olive oil and the so-called European extra virgin olive oils sold in supermarkets, says Herald columnist Paul Holmes, who also declares his interest as a New Zealand producer of extra virgin olive oil.
The program sent 14 extra virgin olive oils bought at 14 supermarkets off to Australia for testing. The entire seven randomly-chosen European oils all failed to pass the extra virgin test.

It’s a good time to think big when it comes to growing table olives in California, and fewer trees this year are going into the ground in the state to produce olive oil. But production of olive oil in California is expected to nearly double over the next few years. And both industries have a common enemy — imports of questionable quality. Those were among observations at a University of California program in Tulare where participants also heard the latest on mechanical harvesting, olive knot and verticillium management and use of olive mill waste water for nutrition and for management of olive diseases and insect pests.

Sales of imported food items are growing at 20-25% and are seen touching 30-35% in the next two years. The sales of olive oil have overtaken those of Saffola, a premium cooking medium made from sunflower seeds, in Big Bazaar and Food Bazaar, the food and grocery retail chains of India’s largest listed retail company Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd. That olive oil costs two-and-a-half times the price of regular sunflower oil and is at least 25% more expensive than Saffola hasn’t deterred buyers.

An unusually well-preserved olive oil press was unearthed by archaeologists on the outskirts of the city of Modi’in in central Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced recently. The press “was used for industrial oil production for consumption and illumination about 1,400 years ago,” the IAA said. That means the press would have been active around the end of the period of Byzantine rule and the beginning of Muslim rule in 637 CE.

Think of extra virgin olive oil as wine. Like grapes, different varieties of olives have regional characteristics and bring different flavors to the oil. Not all olives are grown, harvested and pressed equally. Compared with Mediterranean populations, Americans caught on late to extra virgin olive oil, but we are trying to catch up. “In the United States, olive oil consumption is increasing each year and [people are] getting a little more sophisticated,” says Bob Profaci of Glen Rock, who is part of the family business that imports Colavita olive oils to the US.

Water shortage due to climate change could make parts of one of Catalonia’s top olive oil producing regions – the Siurana DOP – unviable within 20 years, according to researchers. Rising temperatures augur well for optimal development of the olive fruit, but the reduced rainfall and increased irrigation demands in the Siurana river basin will make production much more costly and complicated, they say.

A new report on a huge potential to sell olive oil to China also comes with a warning – opportunists there are already cashing in by selling adulterated oil. According to The Olive Oil Market in China 2012 from the Spanish Institute of Foreign Trade (ICEX), “this malpractice risks tainting the Chinese consumer perception that olive oil is a high quality product.”