Veg oil import up 13% in November on rising consumption

Hits domestic oilseed crushing and refining industry hard

Continuing its past trends, vegetable oil import into India rose 13 per cent in November on rising demand and falling availability from local sources.

Data compiled by the Solvent Extractors’ Association (SEA) showed India’s vegetable oil import at 1.34 million tonnes (mt) in November this year compared to 1.19 mt in the year-ago period. Vegetable oil import into the country has been increasing consistently due to rising consumer demand on steep fall in prices coupled with lower production from domestic sources.

A huge surge in vegetable oil import, however, hit the domestic oilseeds crushing and refining industry hard as their operating capacity has reduced to the alarmingly low level in the past few months.

“Vegetable oil import is rising due to its excess supply in international market coupled with low price and ‘nil’ export duty by the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia which boosted their export to India,” said B V Mehta, executive director, SEA.

The domestic edible oil sector and farming communities are hit by the current upward trend of edible oil imports, which increased 24 per cent during 2014 -15 over the same period of last year (14.4 mt of edible oil was imported from November 2014 to October 2015). Globally, edible oil prices have been historically low, and this has affected domestic players.

The share of refined oil in the overall vegetable oil import basked shot up to 17 per cent in November this year, compared to a mere five per cent in the same month last year. In the entire oil year (November 2014-October 2015), the share of refined oil stood at 12 per cent in the entire import quantity of 14.42 mt.

The sector has urged the government to help raise import duty on refined oil to discourage dumping finished products at the cost of domestic players.

The sector has asked the government to increase the import duty on refined oil from 20 per cent to 27 per cent to protect the interest of domestic refineries.