Italy may have to IMPORT olive oil and could run out of homegrown supplies within weeks

Italy may soon be forced to import one of the country’s most essential cooking products after freak weather and disease devastated harvests.

The olive oil industry saw a 57 per cent drop in production last autumn – a 25-year low – which will last Italian consumers for only four months this year, a major farming lobby warned. 

At a cost of a billion euros (£860,000) to the sector, the decline has forced oil farmers onto the streets in protest as they ask for help to reverse the trend.

However the extreme weather caused by climate change is likely to cause further damage to the crops and could force Italians to bring in olive oil from abroad, according to one scientist.

Speaking to CNN, Riccardo Valentini, director of the Impacts Division at the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change, said: ‘If this negative trend continues, there will be more [need] for importing oil from other countries

‘Olive trees are very sensitive to certain climatic conditions – sometimes three days of freezing [temperatures] are more important than an average temperature over the year.’

Last month, oil farmers staged a national protest calling for more financial support for the sector, with Coldiretti labelling the crisis an ’emergency’ (olive-growers protest in Rome, Italy, on February 14, 2019)

Italy was hit with bursts of freezing temperatures during the Beast from the East in February 2018, before strong winds and floods battered the Mediterranean nation in October.

Mr Valentini explained that this would be a ‘big change in our lives’, adding: ‘Italians have never used foreign olive oil … it’s very rare you find oil from other countries.’

In February, oil farmers staged a national protest calling for more financial support for the sector, with Coldiretti labelling the crisis an ’emergency’. 

‘To tackle the emergency, targeted intervention is needed to allow producers hit hard by the frosts to start again,’ Coldiretti President Ettore Prandini said at the time. 

Puglia, which produces the majority of Italy’s olive oil, was said to be the most affected by the freak weather, with the region seeing a ‘real massacre of 25 million olive trees’, according to the trade union.

Coldiretti, the country’s farming lobby, warned the crops harvested last autumn will last Italian consumers for only four months this year, reported The Times.