Expoliva Opens in Jaen With Credit for Growers

Expoliva, the biggest olive oil fair in the world by its own reckoning, opened in Jaen on Wednesday with the president of Andalusia, Jose Antonio Grinan, announcing a credit scheme to keep producers solvent while they are selling oil below what it costs to make. The fair runs to Saturday in the province that makes more olive oil than any country outside Spain. Here is what is on show, what was announced, and what the mood tells you.

The fair

This is the fifteenth edition, and it is three events in one: an exhibition of extra virgin oils, a science and technology symposium that is taken seriously by the trade, and the trade fair itself. More than 300 companies are exhibiting, at least twenty of them from outside Spain, including businesses from Argentina, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Tunisia and the United States.

The organizers hope to match the last edition in 2009, which drew about 45,000 visitors, a thousand of them from abroad, across 30,000 square meters and four pavilions. Some regular exhibitors have pulled out, which is what three years of losses does to a marketing budget, and new foreign ones have taken their place. Among them is a firm advising Spanish companies on buying olive groves in the United States, which tells you something about where investors think the growth is.

What was announced

Grinan used the opening to promise a line of credit big enough, he said, to let producers stay solvent rather than dump oil at any price, describing it as a step toward maintaining fair prices. He also told the industry what Spanish ministers have been telling it for a decade: there are too many small sellers facing too few large buyers, and Spain should aim to lead in marketing olive oil rather than only in making it.

The other campaign running through the fair is about the International Olive Council. Isabel Bombal of the Spanish agriculture ministry said she had pressed the Council’s executive director to bring the newer producing countries, the United States, Chile and Australia, into membership in the short to medium term, on the argument that a standards forum works better when the countries arguing with it are inside it.

Behind both announcements sits the same unresolved question. Spain has asked Brussels repeatedly for private storage aid to take oil off the market and lift prices, and the agriculture commissioner has said no each time, on the grounds that Spanish prices are still above the level that triggers it. A working party meets in Madrid later this month to look at other options.

What a fair tells you

Walk the pavilions and the balance of the industry is on display. The machinery halls are busy: decanters, hedgerow harvesters, filtration, bottling lines, everything aimed at taking cost out of a liter. The oil tasting rooms are quieter and smaller, and full of the producers who have decided that their way out is to sell less oil at a better price.

Both bets are rational and they lead to different industries. Andalusia is currently making both at once, which is why a credit line for producers selling below cost can be announced in the same week as new investment in groves that will add more oil to a market that already has too much.

Sources

• Olive Oil Times, Expoliva Kicks Off in Jaen
• Olive Oil Times, 15th Expoliva Olive Oil Exhibition in Jaen
• Expoliva, International Fair of Olive Oil and Allied Industries