TIRANA, Jan. 26, 2023 – One the largest olive harvests ever has led to a record production of olive oil in Albania this year. But the boom in production has exposed another problem: Albania’s inability to export.
Most oil producers have not been able to secure the needed certification to export even though the country has dozens of olive processing factories.
This comes at a time when cold-pressed, high-quality Albanian olive oil is being sold for as little as 4 dollars a liter in the local market, with many Albanians shifting to using olive oil instead of similarly-priced vegetable oil, which is seen as less healthy. Typically olive oil has been far more expensive than vegetable oil, but the war in Ukraine, a major producer, led to price spikes in vegetable oils.
But the low price of Albanian olive oil also means farmers are barely making anything once services and harvesting labor is taken into account.
In the oil processing factories in Vlora, one of the most popular areas for olive cultivation in Albania, farmers are now sending the last of the olives harvested this season. The area has more olive production this year than the domestic market can absorb.
The director of the Center for the Transfer of Agricultural Technologies in Vlora, Meno Besimaj, says that the increase in production this year has been influenced by the climatic conditions, the increase in the areas planted with olive trees and the improvement in the technologies of olive services.
“There are 11 million olive trees in the country, and about 9 million produced this year. And more trees are being planted every year,” he said, adding: “In a survey that we have done on a national scale and from the statistical data, we estimate that this season there may be about 150,000 tons of raw olives harvested this year, producing about 20,000 tons of olive oil.”
About 90 percent of olive oil sold in Albania is not done through supermarkets, but by farmers and small producers themselves, and the overproduction of oil has brought a significant decrease in the price in the market this year.
Despite the massive production, olive oil exports remain low. In 2021, only 119 tons were explored, worth about half a million dollars. In 2022, the value is expected to be similarly low.
Almost half of Albanian olive oil exports go to the United States and the rest to neighboring countries such as Kosovo and North Macedonia, while export to the EU is very small.
Albanians’ love for olive trees — they have more than doubled in number in two decades — does not mean that they can use them to export to the EU, technical experts warn, as Albanians current and future deals with the EU will be heavily influenced by EU member states that are olive oil powerhouses, protecting their own producers.
Experts say that the lack of Albanian association of farmers who produce olives makes it difficult to increase export capacities. The only way to export oil in large quantities is only cooperation and certification on a group basis, on a cultivar basis.
Enerik Xhaferaj, an olive oil processor in Vlora, says that one of the challenges for producers to export is certification.
“First, the product must be certified. The product is not certified because the farmers do not handle the production in the right way, they bring it in bags, keep the olives at home for days, do not collect them cleanly, etc., and this leads to lower quality of the oil,” he notes.
Another challenge for Albanian enterprises to ensure the export of olive oil is the strengthening of laboratory capacities to certify both the varieties of olive plants and the quality of the oil.
The Agricultural Center in Vlora provides biomolecular analysis of indigenous varieties of the olive plant and some basic analyzes for oil, but there is still much room for increasing capacity with equipment and training to meet the wide range of laboratory analyzes needed, says Melaize Yzeiraj, an official at the laboratory.
Certification of Albanian laboratories at international levels and strengthening their capacities to respond to complex analysis remains a challenge to ensure the export of olive oil, she adds.
