Greece’s olive oil crisis is bad enough to tempt thieves

Olives were a low-stress crop for millennia, but Greece shows how climate change has made the harvest much less predictable—and growing regions more desperate

• Lauren Markham

Last December, at the height of Greece’s olive harvest season, two men drove a stolen white truck to the Glyfada mill in a small town not far from Kalamata. After idling the truck for a while, the men stepped out of the cab, loaded 33 sacks of olives into the back of the truck, then drove to a field. They transferred their haul, worth about €1,500 (a bit more than $1,700), into different bags—presumably attempting to conceal its provenance—then dropped off the truck back at the municipal office where they’d pinched it. Unfortunately for them, they’d parked their ill-gotten getaway vehicle directly in front of the mill’s security camera, which made them easy to track. Also, they brought their bags to a second mill nearby and asked the owner to press the stolen olives into oil. Suspicious, he called the authorities, and that was that.

The whole thing had an air of slapstick about it. Who thinks they can get away with such buffoonery in a small town, where news travels fast? Stealing olives, of all things? But the theft was on trend. Rising temperatures in the Mediterranean had rendered olive oil scarcer than it had been in recent memory, leaving some of the growing region’s residents desperate enough that such a theft started to make sense.

Olives have been a hardy staple for thousands of years throughout the Mediterranean because the trees thrive in dry climates. But these days olive growers in Spain, Italy and Greece—the world’s top three producers—are struggling to keep their groves from getting too dry. Greece is a leading indicator: The smallest and poorest of the three countries, it’s focused on catering to buyers of high-quality extra-virgin oil and exports more than $1 billion worth of oil a year. Of the three, it’s also suffered the most climate damage, about $400 per capita in 2023, according to Eurostat, the EU’s research office. Greek farmers who eke out a living with minimal technological assistance must now reckon with the growing risk of wildfires, which burned more than 11,000 acres of olive orchards last year. “The climate impacts were so intense that it almost destroyed all our production,” says Michael Antonopoulos, who heads the Agricultural Olive Oil Cooperative of Kalamata. “We don’t have the weapons to fight this problem.”

Thieves have also hit olive oil distributors in Spain and Italy, and smaller operations in Houston and Montreal, for that matter. But news of thefts has abounded in Greece, with stories appearing in Facebook posts and local and international outlets. Some of these heists were large in scale, such as the 37 tons of olive oil stolen in drums from a mill in Halkidiki, to the north. (That oil was worth more than $300,000 to the local growers cooperative.) Others, however, smacked less of Ocean’s Eleven and more of subsistence.

On the island of Crete, a group of thieves crept into a man’s house and took more than 400 pounds of his personal olive supply. On the outskirts of Athens, farmers awoke to find their olive trees cut down overnight. Sometimes the thieves took the entire tree, leaving only the stump; other times they absconded with only the olive-laden branches. Bags of fresh-cut olives disappeared from the fields before farmers had a chance to haul them to the mill. In the Messenia peninsula, not far from Kalamata, locals reported that thieves broke into cemeteries to steal the stores of olive oil set aside to light lamps and even bottles left as offerings for the dead.

For generations, the average Greek olive farmer has known somebody who knows somebody who’s been ripped off, but this felt different, like a new normal. Fluctuating temperatures rendered Greece’s 2023-24 harvest so paltry that some farmers decided it wasn’t even worth picking the olives from the trees. Olive oil lovers may have noticed a price spike around then; the global cost per pound roughly doubled. Inflation, food insecurity and supply-chain breakdowns have also helped keep prices elevated. Food and agricultural products now account for one-third of all hijackings, according to an analysis by the BSI Group.

“Last year was probably the worst period I’ve seen in 20 years,” says Prokopios Magiatis, a professor at the University of Athens and a scientist who studies olive production. This year, things have rebounded significantly, with a yield of 250,000 tons, more than double last year’s dismal number. (This time around, Greece even slightly outproduced Italy.) Yet the future of the country’s olive industry still feels shakier than it has in most farmers’ lifetimes. Greek olive harvests did more than their share to help foster human civilization. In a tour of several key olive-producing parts of Greece this winter, I sought to examine the question of what happens when that building block starts to wobble. As one farmer in Laconia put it to me, when it comes to planning, “May is no longer May anymore.”

Homer may have been the first to call olive oil “liquid gold,” but whoever coined the nickname, it stuck. Ancient Greeks used the oil to anoint their body, produce their perfumes, light their lamps and cook their food, and often left bottles of it as offerings to the gods. They also propagated their trees for export, making the oil a prized commodity across civilizations. And speaking to the tenacity of the crop, some of the silvery branches from Homer’s day are still around. Olive trees can live many thousands of years, growing from pliant wisps into stately, gnarled monuments with canopies wide enough to live under.

Today, olive oil constitutes 25% of all Greek agriculture and 7% of the country’s gross domestic product. Modern Greeks largely rely on olive oil for cooking, more so than anyone else: Each Greek uses around 5 gallons of olive oil a year for everyday cooking, about 10 times as much as the average American. The antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of extra-virgin olive oil (the good stuff, which is mechanically cold-pressed without chemical help) are prized by folk healers and Big Pharma alike.

“According to ancient Greeks, it was illegal to cut the olive tree,” a grower and yoga teacher named Kalliope Ziogou tells me during a walk through a hillside orchard on the island of Evia, where a massive wildfire burned a few years ago. “Even if it was damaged, there was always the possibility of regrowth.” Ziogou points out all the charred trees, as well as all the shoots of new growth from trees that, right after the fire, had seemed dead. “For two years, they were completely black,” she says. Now, silver-green growth shoots upward from the blackened trunks. “That’s why I respect them. They are powerful and have great stamina and tolerance.” Still, she adds, it will take a decade, maybe two, before those trees produce olives again.

Olive trees have historically thrived in this arid region because they require little to no irrigation. Yet, according to the European Environment Agency, temperatures there have risen roughly 1.2C (about 2.2F) from preindustrial levels. Summer temperatures are beginning to stress the stoic trees more than they can take, forcing many farmers to rely on irrigation for the first time. This has made cultivation costlier and more labor-intensive. Ziogou and Father Christos, a local olive-growing priest, say the 2021 fire burned about 80% of the olive groves on the island, one of Greece’s largest. This devastation exposed the hillsides, creating more inland wind and noise. During the 2023-24 season, a fire in the Evros region bordering Turkey claimed more than 130,000 olive trees.

“From the first moment of the fire, I knew that we will all be burnt down to the ground,” Ziogou says. “It will come to our farm. It will come to every village. And it did.” The day after the fire, almost all her trees were black.

What gets far less attention than the extreme summer heat, though, are the swelling winter temperatures. “The main problem is the high temperature during winter,” Magiatis says. Cold temperatures in January and February send a signal for the tree to enter its dormant period, which it needs to preserve its energy resources to prepare for spring. “If the tree does not feel it is winter,” he says, “this cycle does not work properly.” We’re not talking all that cold; he estimates that Greece’s trees need only at least two weeks in a row of temperatures below 50F. But that’s getting tougher. During the walk in January with Ziogou, the olive grower and yoga teacher, Evia is unseasonably hot, enough for me to feel comfortable in a T-shirt.

Another factor that affects olive production is rainfall. It’s not that there isn’t enough of it, says Antonopoulos of the Kalamata cooperative, but that it comes at the wrong time. Too little rain in the winter means the trees will have less moisture stored up for the summer, but a rain in the hot months of May or June can be devastating to a harvest, causing the flowers to turn prematurely and encouraging pests like the vexing olive fruit fly (known in Greece as the Dakos fly), whose larvae feed on the fruiting trees.

Rain during harvest season, as the farmers experienced this year, can be worse still. Roughly one-third of the annual rainfall in Kalamata took place in December, during peak harvest, drowning a great many olives and costing farmers 20% to 30% of their yield. The olives were smaller too, which made less oil. At a wholesale price of about $20 a gallon, the area’s farmers would barely turn a profit.

On harvest day in Nemea, home to an ancient Temple to Zeus and nestled in the foothills of the Arcadian mountains, a team of workers use a handheld machine to shake olives loose from their branches onto green nets below. After each tree has been cleaned of fruit, the workers gather the nets in their arms like bedsheets and dump the olives into large red bins. From there, it’s onto screens where the workers pluck out stray leaves, then funnel the crop into hip-high plastic bags much like the ones heisted in the stolen municipal truck the month before. Once his team is done harvesting, a farmer named Konstantinos Papaioannou heads straight to the mill to press the oil.

Like everyone I’ve spoken with in Greece, Papaioannou is emphatic about the perils of climate change. It’s here to stay, he says, and he intends to adapt, both by planting the most resilient varieties of trees he can find and by updating his methods to safeguard them. “I spray every year now,” he says, which requires time and equipment—more funds. Some farmers have focused on short-term security measures (cameras, fences, nightly armed vigils, even microchipping branches for tracking), but those thinking long term are wrestling first and foremost with the climate.

Papaioannou sprays his trees more often than he used to with a nontoxic pesticide and irrigates them farther from the trunk to encourage the roots to seek out moisture. When he transitioned this particular field from grapes to olives a few years ago, he opted to plant the trees closer together—30 to an acre where he once planted 10 or 12—so as to maintain more ground moisture from the canopy cover. This makes sense the way he explains it, though farmers in Evia have taken the opposite tack, planting trees farther apart to make it harder for fire to spread.

Historically, farmers relied on their family to harvest olives, but that’s becoming a tradition of the past. Now, Greece is reckoning with a massive labor shortage, which, according to a representative from the Greek Association of Table Olives, “has disastrous consequences” for the olive sector and the country as a whole. In the 2022-23 crop year, 20% to 30% of green table olive varieties remained on the trees unharvested, resulting in a €27 million loss across Greece, according to the table olives association.

So severe is this shortage—and so powerful the olive lobby—that last year, Greece’s right-wing government, which has campaigned on closing the borders and has been widely accused of carrying out abuses against immigrants, fast-tracked a visa for undocumented workers to staff the olive groves. But the farmers I’ve spoken with say they either distrust the program (because of the government, xenophobia or both) or have found the bureaucracy too difficult to navigate. Rising costs of living might also be a factor. Last year, when prices of olive oil were soaring, foreign and domestic workers throughout Greece began demanding more pay. Now they can expect to make about €60 a day, up from about €40. The threat of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs has added further headwinds. Most recently delayed until late July, the levies in their strictest form could devastate Europe’s export markets.

Generally speaking, Greeks don’t love that so much of their olive oil is bought by Italian companies and repackaged as oil “from Italy,” but they need the global marketplace. Some of their business comes from connoisseurs (also known as snobs): Like wine or chocolate or coffee, the taste range from one bottle of olive oil to another, or even one year to another, can vary from peppery to smooth, bitter to acidic, fruity to nutty. But producers also rely on orders from the conglomerates that are willing to mix and match. Some farmers recoil when I tell them about a label I spotted on a bottle at Whole Foods: “International Olive Oil from Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and Italy!” Still, selling to the conglomerates is better than not selling at all. In spite of recent crackdown efforts, olive oil remains widely counterfeited, diluted with cheaper oil or mislabeled as virgin or extra-virgin when it’s not.

Pride in their craft helps keep many small farmers going. So does a sense of stewardship. “If we make it through these difficult times,” Papaioannou says, “it’s because of the satisfaction I get from seeing these trees I planted when they were so small bear fruit.” Harvest day is a happy day, he adds. “I’ll be even happier when I see all the bottles.”

However valuable to the economy, olives aren’t merely a -commodity in Greece, but a point of national pride and the source of a reverence verging on the spiritual. They’ve grown well and easily here for just about all of recorded history, making it difficult to imagine what might come after. One possibility is that olive cultivation moves uphill to cooler temperatures, but that would require radically remaking the entire landscape and likely casting aside many growers in the flatlands.

When I visit in January, a usually bustling mill in the Athens exurb of Paiania has been closed for weeks. It’s been a hot season for this particularly arid valley. One grower says that this year, like last, his 1,000 trees yielded only about 20% of the roughly 3 tons of oil he usually presses. Thefts have also become common in the fields interspersed among the buildings and businesses of Athens’ outer sprawl.

Although Kalamata has felt the effects of climate change far less dramatically, it has struggled too. Even so, on the day I visited, the mill at the Agricultural Olive Oil Cooperative of Kalamata is surrounded by green crates teeming with olives. Inside, hulking vats shudder and whir as they wash and sort the crop, suck the olives up into great vats that masticate and then press the pulp, eventually siphoning green threads of oil into basins in a steady pour. The room is filled with an earthy aroma both sour and sweet, a combination of wet soil, turned flowers and yeast. There’s a precarious art not only to the growing but also the pressing of oil in the age of climate change. Using warmer temperatures at the mill leads to more oil, but it’s of reduced quality, because more of the prized polyphenols—those antioxidants fit for the gods—are burned away.

Antonopoulos, of the Kalamata cooperative, says he’s far less concerned with thefts than he is with olive producers dropping out of the industry as a result of rising costs. “Many people are abandoning olives,” he says, and the fields are just “becoming forest.”

This is much the same lament as that of Father Christos in Evia, who notes that elders in the area who made their life growing olives gave up after the 2021 fires. What will happen to the acres they abandoned? “Nothing,” he says. Young people can see the struggle that awaits them in the fields, and the fires (and the floods that followed) dissuaded them too. Olive groves no longer stewarded by humans quickly become unproductive. “It would take too long to harvest those trees,” Father Christos says with a degree of sadness. Every year, because of the pressures from a changing climate, land once plump with olives becomes merely a feral hoard of trees, not worth even a thief’s time.

This story was produced with financial support from the Pulitzer Center.