India: Finolex ventures into olive oil
Every so often a company from far outside the olive world announces a plantation in unlikely soil. Behind the headlines sits a real, stubborn question: can the Mediterranean’s signature tree be made to grow in the deserts of India? Rajasthan spent years finding out.
India drinks and cooks with a great deal of olive oil, almost all of it imported. So the idea of growing olives on Indian soil has an obvious appeal — cut the import bill, put barren land to work, and give farmers a high-value crop. Over the years various players, from state governments to industrial groups better known for pipes and cables, have floated olive schemes on that logic. The romance is easy; the agronomy is not.
The Rajasthan experiment
The most serious effort began in Rajasthan in 2007, when the state — inspired by olives thriving in Israel’s Negev desert — imported saplings and expertise from Israel and planted them in the Thar. It was a genuine agronomic gamble: the olive tolerates heat and drought, but it needs a winter cool enough to trigger flowering, and it does not love the fierce, dry extremes of a true desert. The answer, it turned out, was cautiously yes. Trees took, and by the early 2010s Rajasthan was pressing its first Indian-grown olive oil and even launching a home-grown brand.
Why it is harder than it looks
Success in a desert comes with a bill attached. Olives there lean heavily on drip irrigation and careful management; the water an olive grove needs is precisely what a desert lacks, so every litre must be engineered in. Yields and oil content can be respectable, but the economics are unforgiving next to Spanish or Tunisian oil produced on rain and centuries of practice. The tree can grow in Rajasthan. Whether it can grow there profitably, at scale, without permanent support is the harder question — and the one that decides whether these ventures endure.
What it tells us about the olive
The wider lesson is about the tree itself. The olive is far tougher and more portable than its Mediterranean image suggests — it now grows commercially in California, Argentina, Australia, South Africa and beyond. But ‘can grow’ and ‘grows well cheaply’ are different claims, and the gap between them is water, winter chill and cost. India’s desert trial is a fine reminder that the romance of a new olive frontier always meets the arithmetic of irrigation.
| Where | Rajasthan, arid northwest India |
|---|---|
| Origin of know-how | Israel (Negev desert varieties) |
| Started | Around 2007 |
| Key input | Drip irrigation, careful management |
| Result | Trees established; first Indian oil in the early 2010s |
| Main constraint | Water cost and desert extremes |
The takeaways
- The olive is tougher and more mobile than its Mediterranean image — but not infinitely so.
- Desert growing depends on engineered water, which reshapes the economics.
- Olives need a cool winter to flower; pure tropical heat will not do.
- ‘Can grow’ is not ‘grows profitably‘ — irrigation and chill decide the difference.
Olives in India: common questions
Can olives grow in India?
Yes, in the right pockets — Rajasthan’s desert trial, using Israeli varieties and drip irrigation, has established trees and produced Indian-grown olive oil, though the economics remain challenging.
Why Rajasthan of all places?
Because olives thrive in Israel’s Negev desert, and Rajasthan’s arid northwest offered a similar climate plus barren land the state hoped to make productive.
Does India make its own olive oil now?
In small quantities. Rajasthan pressed its first home-grown oil in the early 2010s and launched an Indian brand, but the vast majority of olive oil in India is still imported.
What makes desert olive growing hard?
Water. Olives tolerate heat and drought but still need irrigation to crop well, so a desert grove must supply by pipe the water it cannot get from rain — which is costly.
Do olives need cold weather?
They need a cool winter spell to trigger flowering, which is why the tree suits Mediterranean and subtropical climates rather than constant tropical heat.
Whenever a firm from outside the olive world plants a grove in surprising soil, treat the announcement as a beginning, not a result. The olive really is a remarkably adaptable tree, and stories of it growing in a desert are true. But the trade question is never ‘will it grow’ — it is ‘will it grow well enough, cheaply enough, to compete with oil made on free rain and a thousand years of practice’. Watch the water bill, not the ribbon-cutting.
Background on olive cultivation in Rajasthan and the adaptability of the olive tree.