How One Province in Andalucía Sets the Price of Your Olive Oil
A hot, dry autumn in Spain trimmed the world's 2025/26 olive oil harvest by about 4%, to roughly 3.44 million tonnes, with the planet's biggest growing region, Jaén, cutting its outlook some 20%. Yet prices are falling — for now.
TL;DR — Drought and a hot, dry autumn in Spain pushed the International Olive Council's 2025/26 global olive oil forecast down about 4% to roughly 3.44 million tonnes, with the world's biggest growing region, Jaén, cutting its outlook by about 20%.
There are not many groceries whose global price hangs on the weather in a single Spanish province, but olive oil is one of them. For the 2025/26 crop year, that province had a bad autumn — hot, dry, and stubbornly rainless — and the entire world's harvest number moved because of it. Spain pours out close to half the olive oil on Earth, so when its groves shrink, the spreadsheet that the whole industry reads gets rewritten. And it happened just as the market was finally exhaling after a punishing multi-year price crisis.
Start with the global number
The International Olive Council (IOC) puts 2025/26 global production at roughly 3.44 million tonnes, a decline of about 4% from the season before. That dip follows a blockbuster 2024/25, when output leapt 38% to around 3.57 million tonnes once the worst of the drought finally broke.
So this is not the crisis returning. It is a stumble. But it is an instructive one, because of where the ground gave way.
The province that moves the market
Spain is still Europe's heavyweight, with output pegged near 1.37 million tonnes — three to eight percent under the October 2025 forecasts of roughly 1.44 million tonnes, per Olive Oil Times. Weather did the damage: a hot, dry autumn shrank the fruit and the oil inside it, punishing non-irrigated groves worst of all.
The hardest hit was Jaén, the single biggest olive oil region anywhere, which cut its expectations by roughly 20%, citing drought and a missing autumn rain. When Jaén catches a cold, the world's balance sheet runs a fever.
| Region / metric | 2025/26 figure |
|---|---|
| Global production | ~3.44M tonnes (−~4%) |
| 2024/25 (prior year) | ~3.57M tonnes (+38%) |
| Spain output | ~1.37M tonnes |
| Jaén outlook revision | ~−20% |
| Global consumption (est.) | ~3.25M tonnes (+1%) |
The plot twist: prices are easing
Here the story bends against intuition. A smaller crop ought to mean a pricier bottle, and yet retail prices have been sliding down from the 2024 crisis peak — because that enormous 2024/25 harvest restocked the pipeline. The IOC's January/February 2026 figures show Spain's Jaén benchmark down 2.5% year-on-year, with Italy's Bari quote off a striking 30.9%. A 4% production dip simply cannot drain a glut that big overnight. What it can do is exactly the kind of climate-driven wobble that keeps long-term prices structurally above the calm, pre-crisis world.
The variability is the actual headline
Tune out the year-to-year static and the worrying signal sharpens. The IOC points to a cluster of climate-linked stresses ringing the Mediterranean: that parched Spanish autumn, ongoing drought in Crete, and the olive fruit fly turning up in parts of Italy and Greece. Olive trees also breathe in and out on their own rhythm — the "alternate-bearing" cycle of a heavy year followed by a light one — and climate volatility leans hard on the lean years.
A peer-reviewed analysis in Sustainability Science this cycle said it without hedging, examining "how climate change interferes with olive oil production": drought, heat stress, and erratic rainfall are increasingly the variables deciding whether a harvest is good or merely survivable. That is the real story under the price chart — not a single dry autumn, but the growing odds of more of them.
FAQ
Why does Spain matter so much for olive oil prices?
Spain produces close to half the world's olive oil, and a single province — Jaén — is the largest growing region on the planet. A weather shock there moves the global supply number in a way no other producer can, which is why a dry Spanish autumn becomes everyone's problem.
If production fell, why isn't olive oil getting more expensive?
Because the record 2024/25 harvest refilled stocks after years of scarcity. That glut is still working through the supply chain, so prices have eased from crisis highs even though 2025/26 output dipped about 4%. A modest decline doesn't immediately reverse a large surplus.
Is climate change permanently threatening olive oil?
It's making harvests more volatile rather than ending them. Drought, heat stress and erratic rainfall increasingly determine whether a year is strong or weak, and researchers expect that variability — layered on olive trees' natural alternate-bearing cycle — to keep long-term prices structurally elevated.
Sources: International Olive Council (Dec 2025), International Olive Council (Jan/Feb 2026), Olive Oil Times, Sustainability Science.
Image: Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
← Back to all posts