Tunisia exported 368,000 tonnes of olive oil — but earned less per tonne

Tunisia's National Observatory of Agriculture, ONAGRI, has published olive oil export figures for the first nine months of the 2025/26 season. They matter here because Tunisia is one of Turkey's most direct competitors in bulk olive oil.

The figures

ONAGRI also reports that the average export price rose 1.4% in July 2026 against the same month a year earlier.

What the coverage missed: revenue per tonne fell

Read one at a time, the figures look good: both volume and revenue are up. But they are not up at the same rate.

If volume rose 55.3% and revenue 44.4%, then revenue per tonne moved as follows:

t; 1.444 ÷ 1.553 = 0.930 → a fall of about 7%

Tunisia sold far more oil than last year and earned less on each tonne of it. This is the familiar effect of a bumper crop on price: as supply rises, unit value falls. It is the mirror image of the mechanism we described in how Spain's drought set the price in Türkiye.

The real story: bulk versus packaged

The most instructive pair of rows in the table:

• Bulk: 86% of volume, 81.4% of revenue
• Packaged: 14% of volume, 18.6% of revenue

Packaged product earns roughly 1.3 times its share of volume. The gap shows where the added value ends up: oil sold in bulk is bottled in the buying country and often re-exported under that country's brand.

This is precisely Turkey's problem too. We examined the same structure in profitability in olive oil exports: selling a lot and earning little is a question of the marketing chain, not production capacity. In from tree to shelf we traced step by step where the value is created.

Tunisia proves it with numbers: the country is having the largest harvest in its history, exports are up by more than half, and yet revenue does not rise in step — because 86% of what it sells goes out in bulk.

What it means for Turkey

Three distinct effects:

1. Price pressure. More supply in the Mediterranean pulls the world price down. Tunisia's 368,000 tonnes is large enough to affect the price Turkish exporters can get.

2. Competition. In the bulk market the rival is selling to the same buyers — bottlers in Spain and Italy, for whom the country of origin is secondary and price is primary.

3. A lesson. If even Tunisia's 14% packaged share produces 18.6% of revenue, the return on enlarging that share is a calculable thing. The same question follows from Turkey's own export mix, where two-thirds of exports are table olives.

Sources

• All figures: ONAGRI (Tunisia's National Observatory of Agriculture), data published 21 August 2026 (tunisienumerique)
• The revenue-per-tonne calculation is zeytin.net's own; ONAGRI did not publish such a ratio.
• Value chain, export structure and price mechanism: zeytin.net