Italy faces the indignity of importing large quantities of foreign olive oil after a combination of climate change, disease and insect pests reduced its production of homegrown oil by a record 57%.
Unusual 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 €1bn worth of damage on the olive oil sector, according to Coldiretti, the national farmers’ association.
The 57% 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 been hit hard not just by wild weather but also 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.
It is believed to have been accidentally introduced in exotic plants imported from Costa Rica several years ago. The bacterium is spread by an insect called the meadow spittlebug.
Efforts to contain it have proved unsuccessful and the bacterium is spreading “inexorably” north, the agricultural association said.
Before it was struck by the blight, Puglia produced around half of all Italy’s olive oil.
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 olive oil business, Ettore Prandini, the president of the association said.
Investment should be made and new trees planted. The olive oil sector is worth €3bn to the Italian economy, with the country supporting around 200 million olive trees, some of them centuries old.
Italy boasts more than 500 different olive varieties, “the biggest treasure of biodiversity” in the oil-producing world, said Coldiretti.
The dearth of homegrown oil will tempt some producers to supplement their supplies with foreign oil and try to pass it off as 100% Italian, the association warned.
Consumers need to check labels carefully to make sure the “Italian” olive oil they are buying really is Italian, rather than a blend containing oil from other countries.