Why olive farmers are struggling to survive despite rising prices and an olive oil boom.

Olive oil’s rising prices are more than a cost-of-living story. Climate change, degraded soils and commodity markets are putting pressure on farmers, but regenerative farming could be the answer to building a more resilient future for the Mediterranean.

This article was originally written for edie, a UK based digital media brand and purpose-driven force for sustainability in business, empowering sustainability, energy and environmental professionals of all levels to make business more sustainable. 

Over the past couple of years, shoppers have watched the price of olive oil go up on shelves. At the same time, they’ve seen a wave of new brands enter the space, dressed up in exciting packaging and speaking the language of the craft revolution we’ve seen in other categories: single origin, small batch, artisan.

There’s also a huge trend around nutrition and longevity across social media, with more people than ever jumping on the Mediterranean Diet bandwagon. 

It’s not just the biohackers and wellness influencers taking shots of lemon and EVOO in their morning routine; we’re now seeing entirely new populations across countries like South Korea, Japan, and Brazil, start buying up ultra-premium olive oil for the health benefits.

All this should be a really positive thing for the producers who make it. The perception of value is raised when it’s not just delicious but also has evidence around improved heart, gut, and brain health. 

And yet, there’s still tremendous volatility in the market. Prices rise and fall. Extra virgin olive oil—despite its positioning often as luxury—is a commodity. Speculations lead to a lack of security, and the system isn’t often fair.

Firstly, it sits in a category of edible oils which are nothing like it. Extra virgin olive oil is produced without heat or chemicals. It’s simply the juice of the olive fruit—squeezed, crushed, and extracted. What sits alongside it on the shelf is refined and highly-processed. That processing allows those non-virgin oils to have much greater yields than what EVOO can deliver. They also don’t come close to the same rigour and quality benchmarks required to use the legal name “extra virgin”.  The price will always feel steep compared to its shelfmates.

EVOO starts at a more expensive price point, but then you have to factor in the economics at play. Farmers' prices are going up and up year on year, whilst the commodity system goes up and down over the same timeline.

Rising shelf prices, disappearing margins.

Producer prices for extra virgin olive oil at the commodity rate have ranged roughly between €3.50–8.50 a litre over the past year, with Italy at the high end and Tunisia at the low end. Add a typical supermarket margin of at least 40%, and a bottle is already costing roughly £12 a litre before packaging, transport, and other fees are even factored in. As a rough rule, if a 500ml bottle costs under £10, someone in the chain is almost certainly being squeezed—and it's likely the farmer doing the hard work.

That squeeze is structural, not incidental. Commodity buying rewards scale and the lowest price—not quality, harvest timing, or the labour of hand-picking. A grower who invests in better agronomy, or harvests early for higher polyphenols and greater flavour, often can't recoup the cost, because the commodity market doesn't pay for it. It pays for volume.

Retailers and wholesalers, keen to protect their margin and keep their customers, set the shelf price and farmers and producers are forced to accept it. But it doesn’t add up for many. Most farmers we speak to have had at least a 50% increase in their labour costs in less than a decade. Then you have to add in the increase in fuel and energy, as well as almost every other part of the chain increasing its costs. When you factor in a drop in yield due to weather, you’re paying more for less—both as a shopper and a farmer.

Marije, one of our Club producers, had her barn and groves devastated by storms and flooding this February. You can find out more and help here.

It’s the climate crisis, not a bad harvest.

The producers I work with aren't dealing with one difficult season. They're contending with a genuine change in how the weather works. It’s floods, fires, and plagues—and sometimes, like we’ve seen in 2026, it’s all of them in a single harvest year. 

Across the board, extreme weather is shifting everything from the pollination cycles to harvest timings, creating even more challenges for a cost-squeezed producer.

What we see now is unlike anything that occurred in the past. It’s climate swings that would happen on rare occasions, now being a force to contend with year after year—draining pockets and emotions. Supporting the transition to this new normal with things like irrigation is increasingly falling on the farmers themselves.

But in traditional olive groves, which historically have taken up huge chunks of land across the Mediterranean, there’s an opportunity to transform the landscape and create proper havens for nature—capturing carbon whilst also fostering biodiversity and building resilience through reservoirs and soil health.

Regenerative farming is becoming urgent.

The Mediterranean basin is heating at a rate 20% higher than the global average. About a quarter of our food in the UK comes from this region (with a higher proportion in the winter). In the EU, more than 50% of fresh vegetables come from the member states in these risk areas.

It’s time for a reminder that a third of the world's agricultural soil is already degraded, yet we rely on that soil for 95% of our food. Research increasingly links the organic matter in soil to the nutrient density of what grows in it, which means degraded soil doesn't just threaten yields—it threatens the nutritional value of the food itself. 

This was a topic I spoke on at this year’s Groundswell Festival, on a panel with Waitrose’s Chief Commercial officer, Charlotte Di Cello, along with Wildfarmed’s Andy Cato, Mirabeau Wine’s Stephen Cronk, and Bramble’s Chris Mitchell. Together, championing nature, flavour, and health—we’re aiming to show shoppers why regenerative farming will benefit them directly.

While "regenerative” doesn’t yet have a standardised definition yet, at Citizens of Soil we follow the model of farming in harmony with nature. It’s about creating a circular system to lower input costs for farmers and create positive, measurable outcomes. 

Specifically, for the producers we work with, it means farming organically with no synthetics, minimal tilling to protect the soil, using cover crops and other plant life to support biodiversity, and grazing animals or their waste as natural fertiliser.

The urgency to switch to this model isn't abstract. Conventional farming, degraded by agrochemicals and poor practices from even poorer farmers trying to stretch whatever life out of it they can to get a yield, has destroyed parts of the Mediterranean. Some parts of these agricultural belts feel like they’ve already turned to desert. 

When we lose small and independent farmers

Beyond losing our soils, the hard work with little reward has driven many to a life outside of farming, with multi-generational family businesses slowly winding down. There’s simply no one to hand it over to; they sent their kids to the city for education and “better” jobs.

But when small producers disappear, we lose more than a diverse and higher-quality food supply.

We lose whole communities and the vibrant rural culture that exists around it. We also lose groves and cultivars tied to specific families and villages for generations. The whole culture of the production of an ancient plant that’s served us across food, beauty, medicine, and religion since antiquity—disappears. And with that goes a connection to its true value and nature itself.

Environmentally, we lose the biodiversity that indigenous varieties provide, including the pollination support and disease resilience. Nutritionally, we lose quality at the source: industrially-produced, heavily-processed oils strip out the polyphenols and antioxidants that make olive oil worth calling a functional food in the first place. Even when they’re still making extra virgin that’s unrefined, it’s a question of how many more harvests we’ll have from a land that is being degraded like we’ve seen around the Mediterranean already. What more can the soil give to nurture and grow healthy fruit?

For those in the ESG space, this isn’t a niche agricultural story. 

This is the same thing you’ve seen re-shaping cacao, coffee, and even cotton. There’s an opportunity here as much as a warning. Every litre bought from an independent producer who’s making a healthier oil from healthier soil is a vote for those same groves to stay in production. 

This action leads to recovery of soil and of communities who can stay rooted on the land that’s sustained them for generations. 

The alternative is something cheaper that continues to drain the Mediterranean farm lands of its people and its unique nature, while resulting in less flavour and nutrition for our tables at home.