The technical secretary of La Unión Extremadura, Luis Cortés, maintains that the decision to keep 12% of olive oil production stored and not brought to the market until September 30, 2027 will lack effectiveness while the inflow of oil from abroad is not limited.
As he explains, this measure responds to the expectation of a campaign with production 23% higher than the previous year, with around 1.6 million tons forecast. To that figure would be added the 357,000 tons of surplus from the previous campaign, which, in his view, would lead to a collapse in prices at origin.
He recalls that in the past campaign, with production close to 1.3 million tons, the price at origin of oil fell 20% compared with the previous one, and that in the current one, with total stocks of 1.9 million tons, the collapse that was anticipated was “unassumable”.
Along these lines, he insists that the decision to remove part of the oil from the market “is not going to be effective if at the same time obstacles are not put in the way of massive imports of oil without tariffs from other countries,” so, in his opinion, the European Commission “should approve safeguard clauses to keep oil prices at origin”.
In addition, he rejects statements from those responsible at the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia, which point to the fact that the ministry’s measure will cause an “artificial increase in price” of oil for consumers.
In this regard, he emphasizes that extra virgin olive oil, before the private storage resolution comes into force, is currently paid between 2.83 and 2.93 euros per kilo, “far below” the production costs of the farmers. He adds that the fall of more than 20% in the price at origin has not been passed on to the amount paid by the final consumer, so, in his view, saying that keeping 12% of the oil will cause an “artificial price increase can only come from an organization serving the agroindustry, which would have to be investigated for that reason”.
Cortés predicts that farmers will face in this campaign “very important” losses due to the low price they will receive for their olives and laments that the “last” thing they expected was for institutions such as the CNMC “to come and try to push us down further in our economies”.