Olives

Olive oil is not something that we use much of, but the article at reference 1 caught my eye this morning. In particular, the graphic above which says that the Italians managed to hold the price at more than double the rest-of-the-world price for more than a year from November 2024. How did they pull this stunt off?

First step was to get a longer series of olive oil prices, which proved surprisingly easy, with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which operates FRED, providing the snap above. For which see below.

The spike around 2021 is the collapse of the restaurant trade during the plague.

Roughly speaking, the story seems to be that the Italian olive oil industry managed to persuade the Italian public that only genuine Italian olive oil would do. Cheap alternatives from Spain - and now Tunisia - would not do. They managed to keep this up for a year or so - and their oil still commands a substantial premium.

And in response to a supplementary, Gemini explains that the cheese industry here in England and the whisky industry in Scotland have managed something similar. To the extent that I go off to Neal's Yard Dairy once a fortnight or so, happy to pay double what I might pay for cheese in Sainsbury's.

And I now know that Tunisia, a fairly small country, but one which contains the ancient Carthage, long-time rival to ancient Rome, has muscled in big-time into the olive oil business. Presumably they grow oil in the yellow bit, at the top, on the Mediterranean coast, just below Sicily. See references 2 and 3.

PS 1: Gemini provides a footnote on FRED, the top of which is snapped above. The Federal Reserve Economic Data repository is maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St.Louis, an important part of the whole Federal Reserve edifice, of which I had not previously heard. Presumably a rather grander - and more public version - of the macroeconomic databases maintained by HM Treasury in my day. 

After which he goes on to explain how it was originally built on the very same platform - Mimer from Sweden - what one used for this sort of thing before Microsoft's SQL Server turned up - as was used for the very same purpose at more or less the very same time at the Treasury. All very impressive.

As is the fact the the Federal Reserve gives the public access to the database, for which see reference 4. I believe we do something of the sort, but via ONS rather than through the Treasury. They did used to be housed in the same building, GOGGS, one at each end.

PS 2: Amazon run a very good computer system, as, by extension, do Abebooks. But today, Monday, a rare glitch has resurfaced. Some part of Abebooks seems to think I want purchases to be denominated in USD and another part seems to have lost my payment method. Maybe it will sort itself out in the course of the morning. As it is Bahamut Media of Reading are losing out. Not a real bookshop and one for which Copilot offers a mixed review.

And I think I have had trouble with peculiar companies with offices in Shelton Street before. Quite near the west end branch of my cheese store. No doubt the archive will reveal all in due course.

References

Reference 1: Italian olive oil farmers say flood of imports is causing price collapse: Cheaper supplies from Tunisia are forcing producers to sell at a loss, industry group says - Susannah Savage, Amy Kazmin, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisia.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage.

Reference 4: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/.

Reference 5: https://lincolnshirepoachercheese.com/.