EUOIL · From Commodity to Values: Fostering the European Olive Oil Chain


This project aims at designing an innovative and transferable framework for the analysis of the global circulation of olive oil. The EU is the leader of the olive oil sector, accounting for 67% of production worldwide, while the US represent its main export market. Yet, despite this highly globalised distribution, the effectiveness of the EU's promotional and distribution policies is negatively impacted by a poor understanding of how olive oil products' meanings and identities interact within diverse sociocultural contexts. To fill this gap, this project will develop an interdisciplinary methodology, rooted in semiotics and intertwined with ethnography, anthropology and geography, leading to an extended notion of semantic value. This approach will explore the semantic impact of key interactions along the supply chain: with human actors, such as trade operators, as well as other-than-humans, such as “terroir”, media and distribution spaces. The project will focus on emerging stakeholders, such as women-led cooperatives and other minority groups. The resulting framework will be tested on two relevant cases: the US, as the EU’s main trade partner with a high growth outlook, and Morocco, as an emerging supply partner from the Southern Neighbourhood, increasingly integrating with the EU agricultural system. This fieldwork research will produce an in-depth analysis on olive oil as a social object, and a new lexicon to reshape further studies and management of sociocultural factors affecting the global circulation of food products. Overall, this project will impact the scientific approach to agri-food chains by overcoming the current separation between so-called hard and soft sciences; objects and values; and production and promotion. Furthermore, it will foster the propagation and intercultural translation of the sustainability and quality values embodied in European agri-food products and promoted by the Common Agricultural Policy and Farm to Fork Strategy.