News
In the space of just 12 months, Morocco has become a much more visible supplier of olive oil to the Spanish market, according to the latest DataComex figures (source in Spanish), an office attached to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Enterprise. Between January and April 2025, Spain bought 103 tonnes of oil from its neighbour; in the same period in 2026, the figure reached 10,384.7 tonnes. The increase of 9,979% is accurate and verifiable, but it needs some context to understand what it actually means.
Why such a high percentage is not a mistake
The jump is largely explained by the starting point: when the initial figure is so small, any moderate increase in absolute terms translates into an exorbitant percentage. Going from 103 to just over 10,000 tonnes multiplies the figure by 100, and that multiplication, expressed as a percentage, is close to five digits. The same pattern is seen in the economic value of those purchases: from 340,000 euros to 32.76 million, an increase of 9,535%.
Put into perspective, Moroccan oil still represents only a small fraction of the Spanish market. Using data up to February 2026, Morocco accounted for 7.48% of Spain’s olive oil imports, compared with 2.01% a year earlier: a notable advance, but far from a dominant position. Spain is also producing around 1.295 million tonnes of oil in the 2025-2026 season, far higher than the little over 10,000 tonnes imported from Morocco in the first four months of the campaign. Morocco’s growth is real and rapid, but on its own it does not change the weight of domestic production.
Spanish exports have also shifted
The other side of the balance has moved as well. Spain sold 2,721 tonnes of oil to Morocco between January and April 2025, a figure that fell to 673.72 tonnes in the same period in 2026, a drop of 75.2%. In value terms, Spanish exports fell from 11.11 to 2.44 million euros, almost 78% less. The result is a reversal in the trade relationship: whereas in 2025 Spain sold more oil to Morocco than it bought, in 2026 the opposite is true.
What is behind Morocco’s advance
Behind these numbers lies an exceptionally good Moroccan campaign: the Moroccan Interprofessional Olive Federation estimated production at close to 200,000 tonnes for 2025-2026, more than double the previous year, thanks to olive groves recovering after several years of drought. On top of that come lower prices, supported by the preferential trade conditions that the European Union applies to Morocco. Across the EU, purchases of Moroccan oil grew by 712.6% between October 2025 and March 2026, although Tunisia remains by far the main non-EU supplier, with 81% of those imports.
At the same time, Spanish production is going through a somewhat weaker season: the Ministry of Agriculture is forecasting a 9% decline on the previous year, which helps explain why the market has turned more to foreign oil. Taken together, the data point to a shift in trade patterns between Spain and Morocco that merits close monitoring, but they do not yet justify talk of Moroccan oil replacing Spanish oil.
The rest of the map: who else sells oil to Spain
Morocco is not the only player. In the first two months of 2026, Spain imported a total of 39,624.61 tonnes of olive oil, and the Maghreb country ranked fourth among suppliers, behind Tunisia (15,861.10 tonnes), Portugal (13,174.47) and Italy (4,257.19). Tunisia remains, by some distance, Spain’s main external supplier, with a volume four times that of Morocco over the same period.
The same comparison holds at European level: between October 2025 and March 2026, EU imports of Moroccan oil rose by 712.6%, from 1,269 to 10,312 tonnes. Even so, Tunisia accounts for 81% of all the olive oil that the EU buys from third countries, while Morocco’s share remains much smaller. The European Commission’s own report also records steep declines among other traditional suppliers, such as Turkey (-95.1%), Syria (-83.1%) and Argentina (-53.4%), which places Morocco’s advance within a redistribution of suppliers that is also being driven by changes elsewhere, not only in Morocco.
Yenibakis-News
