With harvesting and milling operations well underway across most of Italy, the forecast is confirmed of 315 thousand tons of olive oil for the 2021-22 campaign. Production is therefore up by +15% compared to 2020, when the harvest was particularly poor. This is what emerges from the latest surveys on the current olive oil campaign, carried out by the research firm Ismea and the Italian association of olive oil producers Unaprol.
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The production by geographical areas is very heterogeneous. Increased production in the South of Italy, to the point of ensuring a positive sign on the national production. The recovery is being driven by Puglia, where production increases by +38% over last year. This improvement, however, is not enough to satisfy producers.
The first estimates on volumes of the 2021/22 world campaign are 3.1 million tons. This is a synthesis of the drop in production in the European Union (-3%), due to the expected reduction in Spain (-7%) and Greece (-14%), and the contextual growth outside the borders of Europe, driven by Tunisia (+71%), Turkey (+9%), and Morocco (+25%).
World production of olive oil (thousands of tons)
| YEAR | EU COUNTRIES | NON-EU COUNTRIES |
| 2016/2017 | 1,752 | 809 |
| 2017/2018 | 2,188 | 1,191 |
| 2018/2019 | 2,264 | 998 |
| 2019/2020 | 1,924 | 1,283 |
| 2020/2021 | 2,051 | 978 |
| 2021/2022 (estimate) | 1,984 | 1,124 |
Exports of Italian olive oil fell by -6% in volume in the first 11 months of 2021, with an increase in prices of +4%. The drop mainly concerned the United States (-14% in volume and -4% in value) also due to problems linked to logistics. In addition, there were double-digit volume losses in Canada, Japan, and the UK. In these last two countries, however, the values grew. On the other hand, exports to Germany, Switzerland, and Russia increased both in volume and value.