Counterfeiting Statistic of the Week

Have you noticed something weird happening in the olive oil aisle of your local supermarket? Over the past few years, has the proportion of oil graded "extra virgin" gone up substantially, even as the price of that oil has come down substantially? It certainly feels that way to me, and a quick trip to Amazon turns up one gallon of cold pressed Italian extra virgin olive oil selling for $19.99, or $5.28 per liter.

Enter Tom Mueller of the New Yorker, who in one of those classic New Yorker stories uncovers the shady world of fake olive oil. Not only is Tunisian olive oil being sold as Italian, it seems, but even soy-bean oil and hazelnut oil have been pressed into service, so to speak, and passed off as extra virgin olive oil.

I do love this story, but being a counterfeiting statistics monomaniac, I also have to take Mueller to task for this:

In February, 2005, the N.A.S. Carabinieri broke up a criminal ring operating in several regions of Italy, and confiscated a hundred thousand litres of fake olive oil, with a street value of six million euros (about eight million dollars).

The "street value" of this stuff, it seems, was 60 euros a liter, or $82.60 at current exchange rates. Every wine retailing for less than $60 a bottle is cheaper than that. It certainly seems that the value of the seized olive oil was exaggerated, quite literally, by an entire order of magnitude.

Which is, I'm sad to say, more or less par for the course when it comes to counterfeiting statistics.

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