Italian food police are upping the fight against adulterated olive oil sold as the real thing.
A handpicked group of the Carabinieri elite NAS food security unit has been trained as olive oil tasters to help them nab fraudsters.
Twenty members of the NAS food piracy unit have graduated from a special course laid on by the National Olive Oil Association Unaprol.
They have been trained to tell a real extra-virgin oil from a fake one and pick up subtle differences enabling them to pin down an oil's geographical source.
''This initiative will strengthen the defence of the quality of one of the symbols of the Mediterranean diet,'' said Unaprol chief Massimo Gargano.
He said the task force, which has joined the official roll of Italian oil tasters, would send ''an unequivocal signal'' of producers' efforts to ensure quality in the same year that Italy finally won a battle to make sourcing labels obligatory on bottles.
Italian police have been raising their guard against olive oil rackets in recent years.
In April, after a two-year probe, they busted the biggest racket in adulterated olive oil found in a decade.
Seven olive oil plants were impounded and some 40 people arrested in an operation spanning nine provinces in southern and northern Italy including Naples, Bari and Milan.
More than 25,000 litres of suspect oil was seized.
The 39 suspects were accused of adding sunflower and soybean oil to olive oil and selling it as extra-virgin olive oil in Italy and abroad.
Police blocked ''huge'' shipments of the doctored oil to the United States and Germany.
Farm association Coldiretti has highlighted the importance of labelling olive oil to show its source.
The regulation should be strictly enforced to stem the sale of oils labelled as Italian but pressed from olives in Spain, Greece and Tunisia, it said.
Showing where the olives were grown and pressed is ''all the more important,'' it said, given last year's 12% increase in oil imports from the three countries, a record.
Italian oil production was down 15%, it said.
Italy is the European Union's second-biggest producer of olive oil behind Spain.
Italian extra-virgin olive oils have won 38 EU certificates of quality, by far the highest number in the Union.
