an olive oil so cheap that it is no longer profitable for farmers

Between to Huelma’s Sales, in the heart of the province of Granada, there is a cooperative that groups 1,600 olive producers from the nearby regions. It is only necessary look at its facilities To check the real state of the Andalusian olive: they work 24 hours a day and will triple the triple olive that last year.

And, paradoxically, this can become a problem.

Problem? How will that be a problem? It is true that consumers fall in oil price is somewhat full of advantages. However, everything has a limit. Specifically, the one that sets the fixed costs.

From a certain price, farmers lose money: move to the crews, manage the olive, transport it … It entails putting more money than they can enter.

How much money are we talking about? And that limit (historically, for the traditional dry land olive tree, is around four euros) is about to be reached. Faced with the nine euros to which the liter quoted at this point in last campaign, the price is already around To that red line.

Is this situation normal? In the oil, we have been very bad for years; But this same season we have seen how something very similar happened with The lemons, The almonds either bananas. We have also seen that the wine faces a similar dilemma.

If the production does not conform to demand, the problems appear. And it doesn’t matter whether it is on the one hand or another.

And what will happen to the price? This is a great unknown, the truth. The big marketers have been accumulating losses for years and this good campaign is an opportunity to clean up their accounts. That means as they defended since Deoleo last campaignthat we are not going to see minimum prices in supermarkets. On the contrary, the actors in the sector maneuver to stop the fall of retail prices.

However, market asymmetry in origin causes serious problems To the thousands of producers in Spain emptied.

And it is not a futuristic. “There have been times when the liter of extra virgin has fallen to 3.5 euros, which means that in other lower categories it is in three and this is very worrying because the volume of the current harvest does not justify this decrease so pronounced “, The Director of Agrifood Cooperatives Granada explained in Ideal.

What can we expect? If the fall in prices at origin does not stop, this can be the lace of the change of productive model that It has been planning for years About the Spanish olive grove. The truth is that the dry dry costs has much larger costs than The irrigation or the Superintensive. After several years with financial problems we can see how many drying farms have to close this due to blockbusters and low prices.

That would be many things: a drama for many areas of the country, a substantial improvement in field productivity and huge environmental tensions. Every day that passes, the oil culture has a more uncertain future.

Image | EMRE | Emiliano García Page

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