Olives in the streets

SEVILLE, Spain - Two weeks ago, Marta Ortega of Asaja Sevilla sent an e-mail to more than 40 of her top employees calling for a day of protest and purpose.

Asaja Sevilla is a long-standing olive harvesting company in Seville, Spain.

The next day brought 3,000 harvesters, 45,000 laborers and more than 1,000 workers from the other cooperative companies and industries in from the fields and onto the streets to demand equal rights.

The olive farmers were protesting the stagnant price of olives and olive oil in contrast to rising production costs. The production cost of olives is 16.6 percent higher than the selling price, and olive farms are starting to collapse because of the unequal trade.  

Despite numerous and repeated requests for help from the Board of Sevilla and the Agriculture Ministry, not a single response has been given to the crumbling farms. 

Seville is the top world producer of table olives and produces 60 percent of the total olives in Spain. Of the 105 municipals in Spain, 80 depend on this production, and the industry provides at least 1.5 million jobs, but the jobs are diminishing because fewer and fewer companies can afford to have so many employees with production costs so high.     

“We aren’t being treated fairly, and we are the ones providing the country with its most used product: olive oil,” Quiliana Jaraiz of Asaja Sevilla said.  

Harvesters like Jaraiz stood in the streets for at least eight hours that day waving signs, blowing on Kazoos and chanting. They flooded the streets with olives, smashing them and even burning them, declaring that they would not supply anymore olives until something was done for equity in sales and production. 

“The production costs of olives have increased by 70 percent in the last 15 years,” Marta Martin of Asajas said. “But home prices have remained unchanged.” 
 
In an attempt to rectify the situation, the table olive industry called for interest-free loans for farmers, cooperatives and other production organizations to address the collection and storage issue of the product, as well as fiscal and social security.
 
“This is only a small step in the right direction, in my opinion,” Martín said. “Only a band-aid for a cut that keeps getting bigger. We even fear that if the stores do start to raise their prices we will only see a fraction of the increase.”

Marta was one of the protesters, holding a sign that read “my job can’t feed my family, but I’m still feeding yours” and blowing an Asaja kazoo.

“My feet were killing me at the end of the day,” Martin said. “I had been standing for close to nine hours, but I would do it again, and I would tell my feet to shut up, just like I did for this protest. We need rights because this job is what supports my family.”