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The European Commission will present its plan to begin allowing the private storage of olive oil in Spain “immediately,” ABC reports.
Phil Hogan, the outgoing European commissioner of agriculture, made the announcement at a meeting of the European Union’s 28 heads of agriculture at a summit in Luxemburg.
“My services have carefully analyzed the events,” Hogan said. “Our conclusion is that a private storage scheme is the best instrument to give important support to the sector.”
The hope is that olive oil prices, which dropped to historically low levels in March, will stabilize as a result of the rule change.
Being able to store olive oil privately will allow producers to alleviate the glut of olive oil currently on the market, which has been partially attributed to the price decreases.
Luis Planas, Spain’s minister of agriculture, food and fisheries, applauded the announcement as “magnificent news” and said that the measures must be passed quickly in order to help struggling farmers and producers.
“It represents a recognition of the serious situation facing the olive oil sector in Spain,” he said. “We need a quick intervention to try to correct this situation.”
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[…] Such an attempt to rebalance a disrupted market by reducing a short-term oversupply is a traditional form of public EU intervention known as private storage aid (PSA). […]