The Asian olive oil market: issue #1

We start today a new focus over the Asian olive oil market, namely imports.
If the early rise in olive oil consumption in the Asian Countries made this topic interesting, the latest events in Japan call for some further investigation. Although we do not have figures about organic olive oil, we believe these information can be of a real use also for organic producers and traders. Asia is not considered a producing area - we will come across it later - thus imports are a good aproximation of this market.

Today we begin looking at the growth rates in the last two years. As you can see in the picture below, 2009 will be remembered as a "not-so-good" year among olive oil marketers, while 2010 shows interesting perspectives. Compared to the World market the Asian imports turn out to contain losses in 2009 (-3.9% growth rate vs -14.6%) and show an incredible reaction in 2010 (+42.7% vs +13.9).
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source: our calculation on Istat and ICE data.