November 22, 2021. The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food of Spain, Luis Planas, and the French Minister of Agriculture and Food, Julien Denormandie, agree to strengthen their lines of work to promote "mirror clauses" in the European Commission's trade agreement negotiations with third countries.
January 17, 2022. Planas conveys Spain's support to the European Commission to promote the application of the so-called "mirror clauses" in trade negotiations with third countries with the aim of requiring imported products to meet the same quality and food safety standards as those produced in Europe.
March 1, 2024. Meeting of the Agriculture and Fisheries Council of the European Union. Planas highlights "the need to increase customs control mechanisms and move forward towards the adoption of mirror clauses that require the same requirements", but considers the adoption of mirror clauses in the EU to be a loss.
February 12, 2026. Massive demonstration of farmers in Madrid to denounce "unfair competition" in the EU agreement with Mercosur for not including mirror clauses.
There are four specific dates - there could be more - and more than one term since the Minister of Agriculture committed to alleviating one of the major complaints of the Spanish agricultural sector: the different standards in the phytosanitary conditions and control of our products in exports compared to the permissiveness in customs when they are sent to Spain from third countries. Nothing has been achieved since then. Unfair competition continues its course and threatens to break the historical Spanish sovereignty of olive oil, the leader in world production in the sector.
Tired of promises is Paco Elvira, 46, a Spanish producer in Fuente del Rey (Jaén). Together with his father, Felipe, 74, and his brother-in-law José Manuel, 44, he has a family plot of 93 hectares, where they usually produce, depending on the weather, about 150,000 kilos of olives a year: "I grew up under an olive tree, with my grandfather, with my father." With a degree in Agricultural Engineering, he is one of the more than 80,000 producers in the province of Jaén, the world epicenter of olive oil that generates 10 million wages each year.
Spain is the world's leading producer of olive oil, with a cultivated area of more than 2.7 million hectares and a production that in normal years without drought exceeds one million tons from more than 400,000 farms, the majority in the hands of small family farmers with farms of between 5 and 30 hectares. Andalusia concentrates more than 75% of national production.
The farmer reviews the numbers from the last campaign again, where he has once again invested a significant amount so that the work becomes increasingly mechanized. The cooperatives give you about 3.60 euros per kilo of oil, a little more if it is extra virgin, 3.96 (data from June of this year), a "reasonable" price if it were not for the fact that in the last three campaigns production costs have skyrocketed: harvesting wages, the mandatory phytosanitary products, water, machinery, insurance, Social Security contributions... The sum does not deceive: 3.80 euros it costs to produce a kilo of oil. The real margin, in the best of cases, is 16 cents per kilo. "The accounts don't add up," says Elvira.
2,000 kilometers from Jaén, a new continuous cycle oil mill has been inaugurated this year in Sfax, the most important port city in southern Tunisia. This is the second line of extraction financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in this African country. Technical assistance is provided by an Italian consortium (Cqverde), which won the competition. Since 2013, and through European funds, facilities have been modernized, farmer incentives linked to the quality of the olives at destination have been introduced, and digitalization tools (Big Data, AI and GIS) have been incorporated to manage the traceability of a country that is not a newcomer to the sector (the Tunisian olive tree dates back to Roman times).
With more than 1.82 million hectares under cultivation, Tunisia is the fourth largest producer in the world (after Spain, Italy and Greece) and the first exporter among non-EU countries. Since 2016, Tunisia has increased its oil exports to Spain by 85%. "The paradox is that Europe finances the modernization of Tunisia's olive sector while it lacks effective mechanisms and tools not only to protect the national farmer, but to prevent this improved production from distorting the European market," cries the producer from Jaén.
The implementation by the Pedro Sánchez Government of Law 3/2021 to improve the functioning of the food chain should have represented a turning point. Its spirit was to obtain "the legal shield of the producer" because the regulations, in theory, expressly prohibit selling at a loss and require written contracts, establish payment terms and require that the price cover production costs, but this is not met in the vast majority of cases. "The sanctioning files for non-compliance accumulate in the drawers of the Ministry of Agriculture," explains the producer, who also complains about the lack of budget to comply with the regulations. The body in charge of supervising sales - the AICA - "lacks sufficient means" to inspect the more than 2,400 registered oil mills and the fines, if they arrive, do so too late.
«The problem is that the Spanish farmer is subject to a very demanding regulatory regime, such as mandatory traceability, digitalized field notebooks, the prohibition of certain phytosanitary products, quality controls in the oil mill... while oil from third countries accesses the market without going through equivalent controls. "There is a clear double standard," points out the national head of the sector at COAG, who provides clarifying information: "Between 2018 and 2023, Spain took only three samples to analyze pesticide residues in imports from other countries that arrived at our ports, and in that same period Spanish producers were subject to dozens of mandatory annual controls."
Climate variability has always played against Tunisian production. However, the expansion of super-intensive olive groves - with technical irrigation systems - and the improvement of resistant local varieties reduce historical production problems. In fact, in the 2025-2026 campaign, it reached between 400,000 and 500,000 tons and its exports grew by 63.9%, generating income of more than 1.1 billion euros. 87.5% of this volume is exported in bulk, which means that it arrives in the EU without a brand, "without final consumer packaging", as raw material available for large Italian and Spanish packagers, "who process it, mix it and market it under their own brands," warns the producer from Jaén. This is “widespread and consensual fraud,” he points out.
The trade agreements between the EU and Tunisia allow preferential access to the community market that in practice is "uncontrollable." Thus, there are three access systems. On the one hand, there is the preferential quota, a type of subsidized quota through which the European authorities grant a zero tariff limited to 56,700 tons. In practice, this quota is exhausted in the first week of each financial year. The second route is the so-called Active Processing Transit (TPA), which allows oil to be imported from Tunisia without tariffs or VAT on the condition that the product is processed in the EU and then re-exported to third countries to support the European processing industry. This volume exceeds 100,000 tons per year. The third are customs warehouses, with enabled facilities where goods remain without paying tariffs for an unlimited time and without there being effective control of their final destination, according to COAG: "There is no specific data on this route, it is what we call Tunisian ghost oil, a true uncontrolled sewer."
According to data from this organization, 38.1% of Tunisian oil exports - almost four out of every ten liters - would have entered the European market "clandestinely or under falsified declarations." "The Spanish Government could request that the safeguard clause between the EU and Tunisia be suspended, but it does not do so," criticizes the producer.
Thus, «in the face of the profitability crisis of the European agricultural sector, the response of the European Commission has not been to review the mechanisms of preferential access nor to activate safeguard clauses for Tunisian oil that disturb the market, which has made it possible to put downward pressure on the prices of Spanish oil through low-cost competition: «We are convinced that we have to escape from the Chinese model, that is, to obtain more production and with prices in the market at rock bottom because our model has always been of quality, because we are very good at producing and we have a differential added value which is our quality and, in any case, it is other links in the chain and not always the producers who reduce prices, especially the packagers, which forms a true oligopoly in very few hands," says Paco Elvira.
Farmers are already talking about a "structural threat" to the Spanish olive sector: "The abandonment of olive groves, especially in areas of difficult mechanization or low water availability, is already visible in certain regions of Andalusia and Extremadura, and abandoned olive groves do not return; they take decades to recover their production." Since this damage is serious, Paco warns about the "environmental and territorial damage."
The olive grove is the largest agricultural ecosystem in the Iberian Peninsula, with functions of carbon capture, erosion control, biodiversity conservation and also has a backbone function in rural communities: "This same scheme can be replicated in other sectors, such as tomatoes, citrus fruits, stone fruits or cereals, so the question is whether politicians continue not to protect the European internal market and without applying safeguard policies or the expansion of uncontrolled products from third countries, such as Tunisian oil with European financing, continues to distort the market with systemic consequences. The threat of catastrophe for Spanish olive oil is a fact.
