Italian extra virgin olive oil prices have more than halved in a year, falling more than twice as fast as Spanish oil, as Spain's harvest rebounds.

The slump has put growers in Apulia, the region in Italy's heel, on the streets at the start of the harvest, while Spain weighs a first-ever withdrawal of oil from the market.

Italian extra virgin fetched €4.37 a kg, or about $4.90, at origin in the week of 5 October, down 53 per cent on the year and the lowest since July 2022, according to European Commission price data. Spanish extra virgin fell 22 per cent, to €3.32.

[explore layer="prices" price="ds:99106" pto="2026-10-15" title="Italian extra virgin olive oil prices, 2020–2026" subtitle="National average origin price, € per 100 kg, weekly to the week of 5 October 2026, when it was €437 (€4.37 a kg), against a peak of €961 in July 2025"]

That leaves Italy's premium over Spanish oil at €1.05 a kg, the narrowest since March 2024 but not far below its 2015–22 median of €1.39. Last year was the outlier: in the first week of October 2025 the premium was €5.01.

Bunches of Coratina olives laid out on squared paper, from pale green unripe fruit to purple-red and fully black ripe olives, alongside a leafy olive branch

Spain's agriculture ministry puts the country's 2026/27 crop at 1,602,596 tonnes, up 23 per cent. Italy, Spain's largest customer, took 32 per cent of its olive oil exports in the first seven months of 2026, according to Eurostat figures.

Spanish extra virgin averaged €3.20 a kg on the Poolred platform in Jaén on 13 October, TeatroNaturale, an Italian trade publication, reported.

[explore products="1509" reporter="es" flow="exports" view="chart" metric="quantity" period="ytd" years="2018-2026" title="Spain's olive oil exports by destination, 2018–2026" subtitle="Tonnes, year to date (window shown on the axis), HS 1509. Italy, the bottom block, is Spain's largest customer and took 194,700 tonnes, or 32 per cent, in January–July 2026"]

Italy's own oil is part of the problem. Stocks of Italian-origin extra virgin rose to 82,195 tonnes on 30 September from 30,381 tonnes a year earlier, the most for the date since 2022, according to the agriculture ministry's ICQRF fraud-control agency.

The oil is left over from a 2025/26 crop that rose 31 per cent to 325,000 tonnes, according to Ismea, the state agricultural market agency, and was priced above €9 a kg into October 2025. ItaliaOggi and TeatroNaturale expect a smaller new crop, of 260,000 tonnes; there is no official forecast.

[chart slug="italy-olive-oil-price-protest-italian-evoo-stocks"]

The slide has been sharpest at the top of the market. Italian lampante, the lowest grade, which must be refined before it can be eaten, rose 7 per cent on the year to €2.77 a kg, narrowing extra virgin's premium over it to €1.60 from €6.68.

GROWERS ON THE STREETS

On 12 October producers, millers and co-operatives gathered outside the prefecture in Bari, the central government's local office, for a sit-in called by Orgoglio Olivicolo, a growers' committee, with the farm group Confagricoltura Bari-Bat.

Unapol, a national olive producers' union, put the crowd at more than 2,000 and said growers were considering leaving their olives on the trees, Il Sole 24 Ore reported. There was no independent count.

"To at least cover production costs, the price of oil should not fall below 7 euros a kilo," Unapol president Tommaso Loiodice said in a statement on 13 October.

Olives were changing hands at €50 to €70 a quintal, or 100 kg, about half last season's level, with talk of about €40 by November, TeatroNaturale reported on 13 October.

Mario Sannicandro of the Cima di Bitonto co-operative mill put the price at €40 to €60, against about €80 to €100 per harvest worker, before machinery, according to local press reports cited by BATmagazine.

At Bari's late-September price of €4.55 a kg, a quintal of olives yielding 16 per cent oil is worth €58.80 after a €14 milling fee, the regional magazine calculated.

The protesters want a formal declaration of crisis, an anti-fraud plan, the withdrawal and storage of new-crop oil, and full use of an electronic traceability document announced by agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida on 9 October, which is still a draft decree.

Confagricoltura called the government's €40mn of interest-free loans for mills insufficient.

On 14 October the farm union Coldiretti Puglia marched 5,000 farmers through Bari, by its own count. The same day the regional government announced €30mn of support, €10mn of it for diesel.

Coldiretti Puglia's demands included action against "Tunisian oil at zero duty". "All sectors are in difficulty, but today we are seeing above all a deep crisis in olive oil, brought on in our view also by imports of non-EU product," Pietro Piccioni, its director, said at the march, Telenorba reported.

Tunisia can ship 56,700 tonnes of olive oil a year into the EU duty-free, according to the US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service, and Italy bought 61,200 tonnes of Tunisian oil in the first seven months of 2026, up 15 per cent, according to Eurostat figures.

On the new crop, though, good Tunisian oil costs at least €3.70 to €3.80 a kg before transport and import costs, against €3.20 for Spanish and about €4 for Italian, TeatroNaturale reported on 13 October.

Brussels has little to offer this season. "The agricultural reserve is already exhausted, so the question would have to be assessed for next season," EU agriculture commissioner Christophe Hansen said on 28 September, responding to Rome's request, as reported in Italian by the news agency Askanews.

EU private storage aid, which pays operators to hold oil off the market, can be opened for extra virgin when the two-week average price falls to €1.78 a kg, according to the US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service. Bari, at €4.30 a kg in the week of 5 October, is more than twice that.

SPAIN WEIGHS WITHDRAWAL

Spain's mandatory withdrawal mechanism, the one lever that could lift prices this season, has never been used.

It obliges operators to hold oil off the market when opening stocks plus the crop estimate reach 120 per cent of the average of the six previous seasons. The test was not met last season under Order APA/1192/2025, and a draft order for 2026/27 keeps it.

Spanish supply this season comes to 127.5 per cent of the six-year average, according to Cropli calculations based on the ministry's campaign balances and the 356,914 tonnes of opening stocks reported by the COAG farm union in Jaén. That would clear the threshold and imply a withdrawal of about 184,000 tonnes, or 11.5 per cent of the crop.

Excluding the drought seasons of 2022/23 and 2023/24 from the average would cut the figure to 112 per cent, below the trigger, as would a 7.2 per cent cut to the crop estimate.

[chart slug="italy-olive-oil-price-protest-spain-withdrawal-trigger"]

Spain's main farm organisations want the order published. The bottlers' association ANIERAC and the exporters' association ASOLIVA oppose it, questioning the inclusion of "exceptionally low campaigns" in the average.

"If the withdrawal reduces our availability or competitiveness in international markets, other countries can take that space, and winning back customers and commercial positions afterwards can be very difficult," ASOLIVA director Rafael Pico said.

Agriculture minister Luis Planas has said the decision will come in the first half of November, weeks before Spain's general election on 29 November. "I don't want to prejudge, but when the time comes we will take the decision that has to be taken, whether to proceed with a withdrawal or, like last year, not to," he said on 1 October.

The 2026/27 order, which the ministry aimed to adopt by 31 October, had not appeared in Spain's official gazette by 15 October.