Euroviews. Olive oil fraudsters have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind

Olive oil fraud is in the news again after 11 arrests and the seizure of 260,000 litres of dodgy product in Spain late last year. 

Adulteration or outright fakery of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) is always a problem, but it’s gone into overdrive in recent months with a skyrocketing price.

Faking olive oil is a wicked crime: a confidence trick on customers and a betrayal of passionate farmers who make the real thing with love and passion.

But bad as it is, the greater crime is what’s behind the price rise and the turbocharging of fraud. 

That’s the ecocide committed in the Spanish countryside by an unholy alliance of misguided farmers, the agro-industrial olive oil complex, price-cutting supermarkets and the providers of toxic herbicides, pesticides and other products, such as Bayer and Syngenta. 

They’ve sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind.

Olive oil is the first industry to be fully disrupted by climate change.

Since the rise of global demand for EVOO in the 1980s and 1990s, olive oil has become dominated by big companies that intensively blend products from giant industrial farms. 

Many of them are based in Andalucia, a region that provides 30%-50% of global supply all by itself. 

These farms, and other intensive crops, have destroyed regional ecosystems through intense chemical agriculture, making their landscapes hugely vulnerable to climate change. 

Megadroughts and local heatwaves have devastated supply in these key regions, driving up global prices to 30-year highs. No one in the industry has seen anything like it.

To those of us in the regenerative agriculture movement, this story is not a surprise, but rather the inevitable result of our industrial-intensive food system.

It goes like this. In the 1990s, olive