A new mission

Explore unconventional sources of edible oil

The government’s move to set up a Rs 11,000-crore oilseeds mission to make the country self-sufficient in edible oils is an initiative that should have been taken much earlier. India has been chronically short of edible oils, an essential item of mass consumption, since the mid-1990s. The casual bids made in the past to spur domestic oilseeds production could not make much headway for want of appropriate pricing policies, which, most often, tended to over-protect consumer interests, disregarding those of the producers. Consequently, the supply deficit continued to soar, making India the world’s largest importer of cooking oils. Today, the country meets its 70 per cent requirement of oils through shipments from abroad. These imports, in value terms, are now next only to those of petroleum products — a situation that cannot be allowed to persist. The unsustainability of these imports has begun to pinch all the more because of the recent spurt in global vegetable oil prices in the wake of demand growth and supply stagnation.

The proposed mission would be expected to boost oilseeds output by providing the growers the needed inputs, technology, and knowhow. Mini-kits of seeds of new high-yielding and disease- and pest-tolerant strains of various oilseed crops, including groundnut and soybean, are planned to be distributed to the farmers in the current kharif season itself. Over 600,000 hectares of additional area is sought to be planted with oilseed crops in this season. Significantly, the overall acreage under oilseed crops, too, is proposed to be expanded by introducing their cultivation in non-traditional vegetable oil-growing areas and by promoting their mixed cropping with pulses and other suitable crops.
 

The one area where the mission has gone off track is the stress on encouraging oil palm cultivation in Northeastern states and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. No doubt, technically, the agro-ecological conditions in these areas are conducive to cultivating oil palm. In fact, some private investors have started raising oil palm plantations there. However, they are doing so by cutting down forests, which is untenable. This would disturb the fragile geology and ecosystem of these regions. The proposed programme would do well to steer clear of it. That said, the fact also is that India possesses huge potential for extracting good-quality and healthy edible oils from several unconventional sources. Cottonseed oil and rice bran oil can be the most striking cases in point. These products are available in abundance and are going almost untapped at present. India is the world’s second-largest producer of rice. But only a fraction of it is utilised to extract oil during its processing. So is the case with cottonseeds. A substantial part of these seeds is fed to livestock without extracting its oil. The proposed oilseeds mission would do well to look into this aspect as well.

There is yet another issue that needs to be looked into. The success of any strategy to enhance domestic edible oil availability would succeed only if the oil producers are assured of remunerative returns for their output. Inability on the part of the locally produced oils to compete with the imported ones, whose prices are kept low by frequently rejigging their duty structure, would hurt any initiative aimed at incentivising indigenous production. Pricing indeed holds the key to the success of any attempt to boost local edible oil supplies.