Executive Summary

The price of olive oil since 2021 has skyrocketed. Indeed, severe drought, crop disease, rising production costs, and surging global demand after the war in Ukraine have doubled olive oil prices since 2018.

This has attracted organized crime across Spain and Italy, major producers of the “green gold,” and caused an exponential rise in theft, fraud, and violent hijackings. Mafia networks and agromafia groups are exploiting vulnerabilities throughout the olive oil supply chain to adulterate, launder, and traffic olive oil, obtaining high profits with low detectability in the region, with incidents also happening outside of Europe. The adulteration issue alone has serious implications for food safety, rural economies, and the integrity and reputation of EU food systems.*

The most common criminal tactic is mixing premium oils, such as extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), with cheaper oils, including sunflower, pomace, and lampante—an oil unfit for human consumption, according to a Guardia Civil Lieutenant from the Technical Unit of the Judicial Police who spoke with Grey Dynamics. Transnational operations such as OMEGABAD and MATSU, coordinated with Europol and the Italian Carabinieri, illustrate the strategic, international scale of these crimes.

Absent stronger enforcement and traceability measures, olive oil crime risks becoming a template for expanding agro-crime targeting other high-value food products. This could severely damage the integrity of EU food systems and global trust in Mediterranean products.