Abstract. The improvement of the agricultural surface
devoted to olive oil production, highlighted the
strong influence of environmental conditions on the oil
composition. In the meantime, the establishment of
shared rules and standard of composition is mandatory
to improve the worldwide trade of olive oils. Rules
are established as Regulations that means mandatory
rules (laws) within European Union, while outside UE,
the Trade Standard by International Olive Council is
the reference standard and at worldwide level, the
Codex Alimentarius (established by FAO-OMS) is the
World Trade Organization reference. The number of
members of these three levels of international organization
is different and an hard work is to find an
acceptable compromised between countries quite different
in terms of agricultural scenarios, environmental
conditions, economic conditions and social organization.
Standards relate to quality and purity characteristics,
this classification is very important because
while quality is a ranking parameter, purity is a cutting
limit, this means that it is necessary to be very careful
in admitting any exception in limits. The environmental
differences between “traditional” geographic area
of olive cultivation, that’s to say the Mediterranean
basin and new areas of cultivation, mainly located in
the South Hemisphere, in some cases strongly influence
the oil composition, even in some characteristics
whose limits are an important borderline to defend
olive oil purity. Nevertheless, it’s an evidence that
some authentic olive oils exist , that for some parameters
exceed the established limits; the very hard issue
is that these parameters are purity parameters and
that the modification of a limit can open the door to
faked oils. Linolenic acid content is an important parameter
to highlight the admixtures with soybean oil,
however, in some areas, the content of linolenic acid of authent ic ol ive oi ls exceeded the Codex
Alimentarius limit; no agreement had been reached
between main producing countries and new producing
ones and nowadays the Codex Standard has no limit
for this acid. Campesterol and Δ-7 Stigmastenol, too,
are very useful to highlight the presence of several
seed oils (the former) and Compositae oils (the latter),
but some cultivar in some geographical areas where
the presence of olive in the agricultural landscape is
rather recent, present concentration of these sterols
higher than the established limit (respectively 4,0%
and 0,5%). In all these cases, the problem is not to
expel from the market some production of genuine
oils, in the meantime not leave any space to possible
frauds. A solution had been to build some so called
“decisional trees”, that are based on the principle of
admit selected “anomalies” for one limit, in the meantime
making the other more strictly, with the aim to
avoid any possibility that the derogation of one limit
can make faked oils not possible to b e distinguished
by authentic ones. In this review, some of these cases
will be described and critically discussed-.
