The Solvent Extractors Association of India (SEA) hopes that sunflower oil imports is likely to fall nearly 80,000 tonnes in April as against 212,000 tonnes in March 2022. According to BV Mehta, executive director, SEA, “India had imported around 127,000 tonnes of sunflower oil from Ukraine, 73,500 tonnes from Russia and 11,900 tonnes from Argentina. These consignments had left for India before the conflict began between the two countries and no shipment from Ukraine took place in April.”
The high prices of sunflower oil in international market at $ 2200 a tonne, lesser availability and high domestic prices at Rs 172,000 per tonne has shrunk the demand and consumption of sunflower oil, he said. This shortfall has partially been replaced by other edible oils like palmolein, soybean oil, groundnut oil in South India and by refined mustard oil and ricebran oil in North India. Also during the last one month, prices of soya oil, sun oil,palm oil and other edible oil declined providing some relief to consumer, Mehta maintained. The average CIF (cost, insurance and freight) price for crude sunflower oil import stood at $2,125 a tonne in March against $1,506 a tonne in February. India imported 1.05 million tonnes (mt) of sunflower oil during November-March of the oil year 2021-22 against 0.91 mt in the corresponding period of 2020-21. The oil year ranges from November to October. Meanwhile, as per the data released by the association for the month of March 2022, the edible oil imports went up to 1.05 mt in March against 0.98 mt in February.
The import of edible oils went up to 5.6 mt in the first five months of the oil year 2021-22 against 5.24 mt in the corresponding period a year ago. Mehta said the import of RBD palmolein increased to 0.77 mt during November-March 2021-22 compared with 24,101 tonnes in the year-ago period. Import of crude palm oil (CPO) decreased to 1.8 mt in November-March 2021-22 against 2.9 mt same time last year.
Stating that the Union Ministry of Finance had reduced the Agriculture Infrastructure and Development Cess on CPO imports to 5 % from the prevailing 7.5 %, on the SEA’s plea for larger duty difference, he said this increased the duty differential between CPO and RBD oils to 8.25 % from the earlier 5.5 % “This provided a minor relief to the beleaguered refining industry, but not enough,” he said.