Portugal Grows Just a Sixth of the Cereals It Eats but Two and a Half Times the Olive Oil It Needs, INE's Farm Yearbook Finds
INE's farm yearbook shows Portugal covered just 16.8% of its cereal needs in 2024/25 while olive oil hit 247.9% on the second-best campaign ever. Wine output fell 14%, the agrifood trade deficit widened to €6.3 billion, and real farm income per worker dropped 4.5%.
Portugal ended the 2024/2025 agricultural year able to cover barely a sixth of its own cereal consumption — while producing nearly two and a half times the olive oil it needs. That is the starkest contrast in the 2025 edition of the Estatísticas Agrícolas (Agricultural Statistics), the annual farm yearbook published on Thursday by the INE (Instituto Nacional de Estatística — National Statistics Institute), and it captures a food system that is simultaneously a Mediterranean export powerhouse and deeply dependent on imports for its staples.
The year the yearbook describes was an extreme one. Autumn and winter were classed as very hot, spring brought abundant rain, and the summer that followed was simultaneously the hottest and the driest of the last 94 years. Even so, the INE notes, water availability remained globally favourable — and for pastures and forage crops the season was exceptional, with heavy production of hay, silage and straw reinforcing livestock farms' feed autonomy. Almost everything else paid a price. Autumn and winter cereals suffered production losses to planting difficulties, excess rain and fungal disease; maize was hit by late sowing and phytosanitary problems; potatoes and industrial tomato fell back; and citrus recorded its worst campaign of the last decade. Wine production dropped around 14 per cent, squeezed between spring mildew and the summer's extreme heat, while olive oil held close to the previous campaign at just three per cent down.
The self-sufficiency ledger that results is one of extremes. Cereals excluding rice covered only 16.8 per cent of national consumption — down from 17.9 per cent a year earlier and the country's starkest structural dependency. Rice, by contrast, ran at 119.3 per cent, with about half the national crop exported. Olive oil reached 247.9 per cent of domestic needs on the second most productive campaign ever, extending the boom we charted when the 2025/26 campaign closed at 160,000 tonnes. Wine stayed above self-sufficiency at 107.2 per cent despite the smaller harvest — helped by rising exports, falling imports and Portugal's own stubbornly resilient wine consumption. National production assured 75.1 per cent of meat consumption and 88.4 per cent of milk and dairy products, with fruit at 72.6 per cent.
In the livestock sheds, 2025 was a growth year with a two-speed pattern. Total meat output rose 3.1 per cent to 976,000 tonnes, driven by pork (up 6.5 per cent to 401,000 tonnes) and chicken (up 5.2 per cent to 376,000 tonnes), while beef, lamb and goat all declined. Egg production hit an all-time record of 166,000 tonnes. Poultry remains the country's most-eaten meat at 47.3 kg per inhabitant, ahead of pork at 40.6 kg.
The economics were less kind. The agrifood trade deficit widened by €1.15 billion to €6.26 billion in 2025, led by a €1.78 billion shortfall in meats, with cereals the second-largest gap; only beverages (a €682 million surplus, trimmed by US tariffs on wine) and the forest sector (€2.68 billion, on paper and cork) pushed the other way. And despite gross value added rising 2.9 per cent in nominal terms, real farm income per worker fell 4.5 per cent, mainly because production subsidies dropped 16.5 per cent. The yearbook's grimmest line is reserved for the forest: 8,277 rural fires in 2025, up 31.5 per cent, burned 270,700 hectares — the second-worst year of the decade, a warning that echoes as this summer's wildfire danger climbs again.
