Italy faces the indignity of importing large quantities of foreign olive oil after a combination of climate change, disease and insect pests reduced its production of homegrown oil by a record 57%.

Unusual spring frosts, extreme summer drought and a rainy autumn – all phenomena blamed on climate change by scientists - played havoc with last year’s olive harvest.

The situation is so dire that the country is on course to run out of homegrown olive oil by April, after which it will have to depend on imports from countries such as Spain, Greece, Turkey and Tunisia.

Last year’s unusual weather inflicted an estimated €1bn worth of damage on the olive oil sector, according to Coldiretti, the national farmers’ association.

The 57% reduction in production was the worst for 25 years and threatens “tens of thousands of businesses, above all in the south,” Coldiretti said.

Olive trees have been hit hard not just by wild weather but also infestations of a species of fly that burrows into olives and lays its eggs, rendering the fruit useless.

The third major factor to have hammered the sector is a bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, which broke out in the southern region of Puglia and has killed hundreds of thousands of olive trees there.