Aside from the sea itself, there is nothing that defines Mediterranean culture and heritage more than the olive tree. While entrepreneurs and immigrants from the Mediterranean to places with similar climates, such as California and parts of Australia, have planted olive groves and developed small industries, olive oil from outside the Mediterranean is a niche product, rarely held in high regard. But Saudi Arabia is challenging the Mediterranean’s 6,000-year hold on olive oil on a grand scale.
While Spain has the largest number of olive trees in the world, Saudi Arabia applied to the “Guinness World Records” for its own title in 2018: The Al Jouf Agricultural Development Company is the “world’s largest modern olive plantation,” with 5 million olive trees on only 7,730 hectares (19,101 acres). The farm also has a production capacity of 15,000 tons of olive oil.
This government-owned, publicly traded farm is named for its location, Al Jouf province in northern Saudi Arabia. It is on the border with Jordan, which has significant olive oil production going back thousands of years but only 11 million trees across the entire country.
“In the last 30 years, the Saudi government has provided substantial support for olive cultivation by offering funding and technical assistance to farmers,” said Ahmed Alali, a visual content creator who is from Al Jouf and making his second documentary on olive trees with fellow Saudi filmmaker Mohammed Alobthani. “Universities and research centers in Saudi Arabia have conducted extensive studies to improve olive cultivation methods and increase productivity. This research includes soil improvement, the use of appropriate fertilizers, and the development of harvesting methods.”
Al Jouf also has private olive farms. “We started planting olive trees in 1992,” said Ibrahim Saad Alhamad, whose family’s olive oil is called Jofal. “Today, we have 2 million trees. The amount of oil we produce varies from year to year, but the average ranges from 1,800 to 2,300 tons. My father planted our first trees, but farming is our profession for generations, starting from palm trees, wheat, and fodder and now to olives.”
Al Jouf is often called the breadbasket of Saudi Arabia. According to the Saudi government, Al Jouf is the largest producer of wheat in the country, and its agriculturally rich oasis is one of the country’s oldest inhabited regions, dating back 6,000 years based on rock carvings found in 2018. Al Jouf was a key stop on the caravan trade route connecting the Hejaz to the eastern Mediterranean and, from there, Europe. It is still the home of Saudi Arabia’s third-largest land port. Pilgrims from the Levant also passed through Al Jouf on their way to Mecca. They may have brought olives with them for the journey, and the people of Al Jouf, like those Mediterranean pilgrims, refer to the olive tree as blessed, in part because it is mentioned in the Quran six times.
“The olive tree means a lot to the people of Al Jouf,” said Alali. “People have been nourished by it since ancient times. They’ve extracted oil from it that is fuel for light, and people have used olive tree branches for lighting fires for heat and cooking. Therefore, it has always been and continues to be a part of human life, whether in Al Jouf or other regions where olive trees are found.”
While the Levant and North African Arabs all have olive oil-based diets, olive oil was not a part of the Arabian Peninsula’s cuisine. But Mediterranean Arabs have now worked in the Gulf for many generations – since the discovery of oil – and have brought with them their food and love for all things olive oil, including soap and medical and beauty remedies. “Yes, in the past, the culture of olive oil in this area was weak,” said Alhamad. “But with advertisements and awareness clips, consumer culture has increased.”
Italian agronomist and author Cosimo Damiano Guarini, a passionate advocate of the health benefits of olive oil, is not opposed to the tree’s cultivation beyond the Mediterranean but has some concerns. “The world consumption of olive oil today is approximately 3% of the total consumption of oils, therefore, an olive culture that targets consumers can really make a difference,” he said. “And olive trees need less water than most fruit trees and demonstrate great adaptability and a strong response to the increasingly ‘green’ needs of agri-food production, with particular reference to carbon sequestration. But we still have to understand whether this path provides economic and environmental sustainability in the medium-to-long term, and great attention will need to be paid to quality controls and sensitivity of large companies to the main product of the Mediterranean diet.”
He noted Saudi Arabia’s large investment in olive trees has been in the “super high-density planting” system developed in Spain’s Andalusia region over the past 25 years. Super high-density trees produce olives at a much younger age, typically after four years, about half the time of traditional planting. They are also planted much closer to each other, resulting in record-breaking numbers of trees in one space, like at the Al Jouf Agricultural Center. As a comparison, Tunisia, the largest Arab producer of olive oil, which has only limited implementation of the super high-density system, has about 82 million olive trees, which cover 1.84 million hectares (4.55 million acres) – about 30% of the country’s cultivated land – a far, far wider spread per tree than Al Jouf.
Alhamad’s family first planted the traditional olive varieties of the Levant, specifically the Souri and Nabali, native to Palestine, the birthplace of olive oil. “Today, we also produce the super high-density varieties of Arbequina and Arbosana from Spain and Koroneiki, originally from Greece,” Alhamad said.
“There are more than 1,300 varietals of olives, but so far we have only been able to develop these three types for the super high-density system,” said Luis Rallo, agronomy professor emeritus at the University of Cordoba and one of the pioneers of the super high-density system. “It limits the flavor profiles of olive oil, so we are risking losing ancient varieties. But it will be very hard to stay competitive without using this system.”
Natalie Koch, a political geographer at Syracuse University, has spent years studying the agricultural history of Saudi Arabia. “I would be concerned that any large-scale effort to introduce olive trees would not have sufficient water to keep the industry thriving in the long term,” said Koch. “And even if there is sufficient water in the near term, there is a risk that this project could jeopardize other small-scale farming operations, which local people need to thrive in the region.”
Small farmers cannot yet export their oil abroad, said Alhamad, although they take part in regional food and other trade fairs, particularly in the United Arab Emirates. In reality, Saudi Arabia still consumes more olive oil than it produces.
But Alhamad remains very optimistic. “Olive oil production is healthy and economically beneficial,” he said, “and at the same time supports food security in the country.”
