Italy forced to import olive oil

ROM E • Italy faces the indignity of importing large quantities of olive oil after a combination of climate change, insect pests and disease has led to a dramatic drop in production.

Spring frosts, extreme summer drought and a rainy autumn — all phenomena blamed on climate change by scientists — played havoc with last year’s olive harvest.

The situation is so dire that the country is on course to run out of homegrown olive oil by April, after which it will have to depend on imports from countries such as Spain, Greece, Turkey and Tunisia.

Last year’s unusual weather inflicted an estimated euros 1 billion worth of damage on the olive oil sector, according to Coldiretti, the national farmers’ association.

The 57 per cent reduction in production was the worst for 25 years and threatens “tens of thousands of businesses, above all in the south,” Coldiretti said.

Olive trees have also been hit hard by infestations of a species of fly that burrows into olives and lays its eggs, rendering the fruit useless.

The third major factor to have hammered the sector is a bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, which broke out in the southern region of Puglia and has killed hundreds of thousands of olive trees there.

The bacterium, spread by an insect called the meadow spittlebug, is believed to have been accidentally introduced in exotic plants imported from Costa Rica several years ago. Efforts to contain it have proved unsuccessful and the bacterium is spreading “inexorably” north, the agricultural association said.

The oil sector is facing a “crisis without precedent” and tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, Coldiretti said.

Emergency funds from the national government are urgently needed if Italy is to avoid being “condemned to irrelevance” in the industry, Ettore Prandini, the president of the association, said.

The olive oil sector is worth euros 3 billion to the Italian economy, with the country maintaining about 200 million olive trees, some of them centuries old.

The association also warned consumers that the dearth of homegrown oil will tempt some producers to supplement their product with foreign oil and try to pass it off as Italian.

In Canada, where the price of olive oil has soared by more than 40 per cent since June, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is cautioning consumers against fraudulent batches.

It has started collecting samples nationwide to ward against olive oil diluted with less expensive fats such as sunflower and palm oils.

While economically motivated, the practice represents a potential food safety risk as well.

“The real problem is, what if it’s cut with peanut oil, and someone is allergic to it and they do not know it is in there? That is why we keep our eyes out, that’s why our inspectors are very vigilant and why once in a while we do these bigger projects,” Aline Dimitri, CFIA deputy chief food safety officer, told CBC Radio.

In 2006, CFIA stepped up its enforcement and began regularly testing virgin and extra virgin product samples to ensure standards were being met. In three years, the percentage of offending samples had plummeted from 47 per cent to 11 per cent, according to Larry Olmsted’s Real Food/fake Food (2016).