Marmarabirlik on Turkey’s Olives, Exports and Costs

Hidamet Asa, chairman of Marmarabirlik, the Turkish cooperative union that buys and processes 40 to 45 percent of the black table olives grown in the South Marmara region, has set out the cooperative’s numbers and its complaints in an interview published this week: sales of about 144.6 million lira last year, EU tariffs and quotas that make oil exports hard, and a domestic olive oil habit of around two kilos a head. This note covers what the cooperative is, what the figures show, and what his answers say about the Turkish olive trade.

Who Marmarabirlik is

Founded in 1954 as a union of agricultural sales cooperatives, Marmarabirlik is based in Bursa and gathers cooperatives at Gemlik, Mudanya, Orhangazi and İznik in Bursa province, Erdek, Edincik and Marmara Island in Balıkesir, and Mürefte in Tekirdağ. Its business is processing its members’ olives into table olives, olive oil and olive paste, and selling them at home and abroad. It employs around 600 people, works on a site of 403,000 square meters with 136,000 square meters built, and can store 70,400 tonnes.

Asa says the plant packs about 150 tonnes of olives a day and can produce and fill 220 tonnes of olive oil a day. Last year the union sold 25,000 tonnes of olives, paste and oil for about 144,572,000 lira, roughly 95 million dollars, through 60 agencies in 53 Turkish cities and into Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Canada, Australia and the United States. Annual extra virgin production is around 1,500 tonnes, small next to the table olive business.

What the numbers say

Two things stand out. The first is the cost arithmetic Asa spells out: olives for oil now cost more than one lira a kilo, it takes about five kilos of olives to make a kilo of oil, so the raw material alone is about five lira before packaging, storage and marketing. When oil gets dearer, he says, consumers switch to cheaper vegetable oils. That is the squeeze every olive oil seller in a low-consumption country lives with.

The second is the gap between production and drinking habits. Turkey makes 120,000 to 170,000 tonnes of olive oil in a normal year and consumes less than 100,000, but consumption is concentrated on the Aegean, Marmara and Mediterranean coasts and is very low in the Black Sea, eastern and southeastern regions. Asa calls the two-kilo national average sad, and he is right to: it means Turkey has to export, and he complains that EU taxes and quota limits make that hard. Turkish producers and exporters have argued about this for years, as we noted when producers and exporters clashed over imports and when growers set out to copy the Spanish model.

What he says the trade should do

• Stop selling only into markets built on Turkish and other ethnic communities abroad, and go after mainstream consumers in those countries.
• Fix processing technique rather than blame raw material: he says there is no shortage of olives, but the quality expected by export markets is not always met.
• Follow local tastes in each market, and spend on research and development.
• Keep cutting salt in the products, and offer sliced green and black olives instead of only whole fruit picked underripe.

The cooperative is also building licensed storage, part funded by international money, holding 5,000 tonnes of olives at Başköy near Bursa, 8,000 tonnes at Erdek and 4,000 tonnes of olive oil at Başköy. Members who deliver their crop get warehouse receipts they can use as cash, which for a grower waiting on a settlement is the most useful thing in the whole interview. For how the fruit itself is turned into what reaches the jar, see our guide to table olive production and processing.

Sources

• Olive Oil Times, Q&A with Hidamet Asa, chairman of Marmarabirlik (August 26, 2010) copy
• Marmarabirlik, cooperative website