Big jump in olive oil prices – E24

In Spain, there are olive oil thieves on the move. Here at home, popular oil tops price statistics from Statistics Norway.

Good for the body, bad for the wallet. Global olive oil prices are rising dramatically.

Now the price of a ton of the good stuff has reached $8,900 (about 96,000 Norwegian kroner), according to a report From the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Here at home, prices are jumping in stores, Turkey has imposed an export ban, while in Spain, they have got a new kind of crime.

SSB: – The most expensive

– Olive oil is actually the food whose price, based on Statistics Norway categories, has risen in the last two years.

This is what Espen Christiansen, head of the price statistics department at Statistics Norway, says.

– The price increased by 49.5 percent from August 2021 to August 2023.

One liter of Ybarra brand olive oil costs 98 and NOK 90 in the Oda online store in September 2021, according to the Internet archive Wayback Machine.

Today, Norwegian consumers have to shell out NOK 164 and NOK 30 for the same product, which according to the manufacturer is the best-selling olive oil in Norway, in the same store. This corresponds to a price increase of more than 66 percent in the past two years.

Christiansen explains that the reason for the difference between SSB’s price increases and the price example from Oda is that SSB bases its CPIs on a weighted average of all the olive oils sold by the largest grocery stores.

– Therefore, the olive oil that sells more will have the biggest say in our goal of the overall price trend.

Drought and thieves

The rise in prices is due, among other things, to drought in Spain, the world’s largest oil producer, according to the US Department of Agriculture report.

Compounding the situation are concerns about declining production in other major European olive oil producers, including Greece and Italy.

This is according to commodity analyst Kyle Holland at analysis agency Mintec CNBC.

Recently, more than 50,000 liters of golden oil were stolen from a factory in the Spanish city of Cordoba, according to the largest Spanish newspaper. El mondo. This equates to olive oil worth about 420,000 euros (about 4.8 million Norwegian kroner), CNBC reported.

This is not the first time that thieves have struck olive oil. in At the end of August, 6,000 liters had disappeared From another factory Spain. No one has been arrested for theft so far.

Now Spanish grocery stores are equipping bottles of olive oil with anti-theft protection, and the so-called paella index is rising dramatically, according to reports. Bloomberg.

Infection effect

Meanwhile, drought and the fault of thieves may not be the reason behind the rise in olive oil prices.

According to Espen Christiansen at Statistics Norway, there are also other factors that play a role in the development of prices, beyond these seasonal changes and individual events.

– I would like to believe that the war in Ukraine is important here too. The country is a major producer of sunflower oil, prices of which jumped after the widespread invasion. He says that higher prices here lead to lower prices for other types of oil.

In addition, Turkey, another exporter, has frozen exports until October. He writes this even though the country has achieved record production US Department of Agriculture. The aim is, among other things, to ensure price stability within the country, which suffers from very high inflation.

The USDA expects olive oil prices to remain high through 2024, and currently sees no signs of prices falling.