Let Them Use Sunflower Oil
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
Francisco José García de Zúñiga is looking across one of the fields of olive trees that he farms. It’s harvest time, and the hum of the machine used to shake the trees as workers beat the olives off their branches can be heard in the distance.
"This is turning out to be another bad year, to put it mildly," he said. "We’ve had two years of drought in a row, 2022 and 2023, and two years of bad harvests."
Mr García de Zúñiga’s land is in Jaén, the southern inland province that is the heart of Spanish olive oil output.
Spain is the world’s biggest olive oil producer, covering 70% of European Union consumption and 45% of that of the entire world.
The lack of rain that this province and other olive-producing areas around Spain have been seeing therefore has an enormous impact on both the amount of oil being produced and its price.
"When Spain has problems, that creates problems for global production," Mr García de Zúñiga said. "If the world supply is lower because Spain is producing less and the demand remains the same, the price goes up – it’s the law of supply and demand."
Cristóbal Gallego Martínez, the president of the cooperative, says that increases in fuel, electricity and fertiliser costs over the last two years have contributed to the rise in the price of olive oil. However, he says the lack of rain is the biggest factor.
"We have a Mediterranean climate, which tends to have dry periods, periods of heavy rain and then intermediate spells," he said. "Right now we’re in a dry period and it’s lasting a long time."
Climate change means traditional assumptions that a poor harvest would be followed by a good one are no longer safe, particularly given that, according to a UN environment programme report, temperatures in the Mediterranean region are rising 20% faster than the global average.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-67565503
Meanwhile back in the real world, olive production in Spain has been at record highs in recent highs. As the man says, Spain often has dry years.
Olive production has always veered from good to bad and back again. The swings appear larger because output is larger. But in percentage terms little has changed. In 1983, for instance, output fell from 3.3 to 1.3 million tonnes, a drop of 60%, which far exceeds anything recently:
https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
It is also worth noting that the area harvested has risen by a quarter since 1981, presumably because of rising demand and, I would guess, EU subsidies.
Almost inevitably this newly planted land is much less productive and much more exposed to the effects of drought. After all, the most productive land will have been harvested already.
This means that harvest will be more volatile than in the past.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Maybe change the name of this blog to BBC LIES ABOUT CLIMATE EVERY BLOODY DAY!
‘Francisco José García de Zúñiga is looking across one of the fields of olive trees’
field – noun
1: an open land area free of woods and buildings
Olives are a fruit so surely they are orchards??
That would work. I was stunned that half way through the first sentence they got stupid. Though probably not a record.
Groves – they usually grow olives in groves.
The crop will not be great thanks to smaller olives but it’s the oil they want, not the water which they squeeze out. These dry years produce some exceptional oils and tasty but smaller olives. Prices rocketed in the summer but have fallen back in the last month. Extra virgen sells €9.25 a litre, that’s 8.03 in GBP.
Still cheaper if you buy the 5 litre bottle
Retail price in U.S. is about $10 per liter.
I haven’t been tracking the price, but it seems inline with Bidenflation.
‘Climate change means traditional assumptions that a poor harvest would be followed by a good one are no longer safe, particularly given that, according to a UN environment programme report, temperatures in the Mediterranean region are rising 20% faster than the global average.’
Word salad.
They are lucky the rise is only 20%. Everywhere else it is rising 2X the global average.
Brilliant! Must remember that and try to use it – just to see if anyone catches on.
It’s just so weird that they don’t understand that regions rising faster than average must mean regions rising slower than average. If the former are proof of how bad it is, the latter must be proof of the opposite.
“It’s just so weird…”
We have to remember there are many intelligent people who are irrational, emotional, and unwise. Indeed, I suspect that there is a positive correlation between intelligence and poor decision- making skills; for intelligent people tend to receive much formal academic education; and are thus trained not ever to ask awkward questions or contradict the dogmas*.
Newton said he was a boy walking next to the sea of knowledge, and occasionally picking up and examining a pebble thrown up on the beach. A proper sentiment, even if Newton’s life shows him to have been preaching a humility and sweetness he did not always practice!
* Teachers always allow easy questions, but generally slap the questioner down, when he “goes too far” and shows “disrespect.”
Is the photo from this year? It all looks very green for the drought I was hearing about on the BBC earlier this year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65938869
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/65006393
You could buy British rapeseed oil.
I usually by rapeseed if I can for general purposes, EV Olive Oil for special
Sorry to hear about your financial difficulties.
Depends what you are using the oil for – EV olive has a low smoke temperature so not good for cooking.
You could use butter.
Butter tends to burn but if you add a bit of olive or other high smoke temperature oil then it reduces this.
Rapeseed oil is likely to contain more chemicals. It’s one of the most sprayed crops. It’s difficult to get organic rapeseed oil – it’s as expensive as some olive oils.
Butter burns easily because of the protein in it. You can avoid the problem by heating the butter and filtering out the black bits. The clear remnant is ‘ghee’- clarified butter – which stays good for a long time. But I buy it in a tin. Indian cuisine uses it all the time.
A mixture of olive oil, coconut oil, and ghee makes for extremely good roast potatoes.
There is evidence that seed oils, in the amounts that are used in the Western world, are bad for your health.
The preferred habitat for olive trees is in false-accounting documents, as the olive oil trade has been murkier than the
actual oil for thousands of years.
Farmers in Europe – notably Spain and France – have been encouraged to grow crops such as an avocados and kiwi fruit to reduce the carbon footprint of these products being shipped from afar.
These crops require huge amounts of water. Much of the ‘drought’ problem is related to an increased burden on water reserves to ‘stop’ climate change.
So yet another ‘green’ idea making things worse.
These days the Spanish use vast amounts of water to irrigate the olive trees.something that was not done until the turn of this century. It was forecast at the time that it would lead to drought. Olives grow well in arid conditions but to produce bumper crops of inferior taste then water is needed
I used to use alot of sunflower oil, but have stopped since its price has more than doubled over the last 2 years. This was due to the civil war we provoked in Ukraine; which was the worlds largest producer. Sadly no more.
“…Ukraine; which was the world’s largest producer. Sadly no more.”
It still seems to be.
In the year from September 2022 to August 2023 Ukraine exported 5.6 million tonnes of sunflower oil which was was a rise of 25% from the previous year.
Russia has also increased its exports of vegetable oil, but probably not to the same extent. Any price rise in world markets is certainly not due to an actual failure of supply from this general region.
There was a big spike in price when Russia was attacking Ukraine’s ports and when the EU put temporary restrictions on imports from Ukraine. But that was all a temporary bit of nonsense, and fun for the speculators while it lasted*. In the last couple of months the price has dropped from $2,360 a tonne to $943 a tonne. So your friendly supermarket is buying a litre of sunflower oil for about 8 p and selling it to you for…
* Well, not fun if you buy at the top. Sir Isaac Newton made a killing during the South Sea Bubble, but was chagrined when prices continued to rise. Plunged in again, and lost his frilly shirt.
Whoops. Typo. 80 p a litre…
The BBC enviro writers are ignorant arseholes.
They pulled the same ‘drought’ trick when blaming ‘climate’ for the ‘drought’ in Spain that caused black-winged stilts to visit Britain this year despite the fact those distinctive birds have visited these shores irregularly for the past 300 years.
The significant cause of recent ‘water shortages’ in many areas of Spain is illegal water extraction for its agriculture & horticulture industries.
That inconvenient fact has been noted by the likes of WWF since 2006
“Illegal water use in Spain – Causes, effects and solutions”
Click to access illegal_water_use_in_spain_may06.pdf
And the European Parliament’s “REPORT on the activities of the Committee on Petitions 2012”
Both specifically mention the Jaén area.
Ooops forgot the link to the EU report:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-7-2013-0299_EN.html
“The BBC enviro writers are ignorant arseholes.”
There’s no arguing with that Joe! Just tell it like it is.
In Canada and the USA, much Canola Oil is sold and is about as inexpensive as things get. The plant – evolved from Rape seed – beginning in the late 1950s.
Search with:
canola rape Dr. Baldur R. Stefansson and Dr. Keith Downey
The name results from the work done by these Canadians.
Canola oil – and sunflower oil – are actually not good for you if you use them frequently.
Polyunsaturated oils contain two types of essential fatty acids (ones the body can’t produce itself): omega-3s and omega-6s. Omega-3s are found in oily fish, flaxseeds, walnuts etc., and are known to be anti-inflammatory. Omega-6s are found in oils such as corn, safflower, sunflower, soy and vegetable, and products made with those oils. Excess consumption of omega-6s can trigger the body to produce pro-inflammatory chemicals, and the American diet tends to be very high in omega-6s. You don’t want them to dominate your intake of fats. Olive is definitely good – it’s monosaturated.
Had god intended I use olive oil, I would have been born in Spain. 🙂
Shortage of Olive Oil? Boddingtons had the solution.
Newly planted trees take years to become fully profuctive. It can easily take 4 years for first fruit and 15 years for trees to be fully grown. So new acreage will be much less productive at first.
And let’s not mention Spain isn’t in drought any more:
https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/edov2/php/index.php?id=1052
The drought map is new to me, Phoenix44, thanks, but it is almost amusing in that it shows the west coast of Scotland and the Western Isles as in drought: they’re among the wettest places that I know! However, it shows the problems in Tunisia very vividly: they really have a water problem, largely from population growth and bad land usage.
I’m well past my ‘sell-by date’.
But I can’t remember a single Autumn (or other season) when farmers were claiming to have had a good year.
It is true that some tennant farmers have had some really bad years. But all the farmers I have dealt with (and that is many) seem to have managed to keep the wolf from the door. They enjoy a moan.
I can’t imagine things in Spain are radically different.
As Paul’s charts makes clear.
“They enjoy a moan.”
All peasants lie to the tax collector about what is hidden under the barn. It is a survival skill. I wonder if there has been Darwinian selection pressure for it?
During WW2, the Germans thought they had good relations with the Champagne producers, who eagerly told them they much they liked the firm hand of the occupiers and gave them unlimited free bottles. Little did the Germans know that the producers had put all the good stuff in secret tunnels in the chalk, which were cunningly walled off; and were laughing at them for not knowing the difference between good wine and piss.
Or there really is no difference . . . .
“Or there really is no difference…”
It is true, of course, that there is no bore like a wine bore…
If I find that a wine I really like is also really cheap it makes me very happy. I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Like most people, I buy the second cheapest wine on the list when in a restaurant and my wife says (me cursing) “Let Dave buy the wine for the table!”
Bit old fashioned these days but the response to such complaints in my youth was “you never see a farmer on a bicycle”.
Have often wondered why we don’t import olive oil from Tunisia, another big producer. Can anyone tell me?