China's April soya imports up versus March

China, the world's largest soya buyer, imported 3.88 million tonnes of soyabeans in April, up 10.5 percent from 3.51 million tonnes in March, figures from the General Administration of Customs of China showed on Tuesday. But April imports fell 7.4 percent from a year-ago period when China imported 4.19 million tonnes of the oilseed, which is crushed into edible oil and animal feed ingredients.
"Due to negative crushing margins, crushers earlier in the year slowed down imports," said one industry analyst. The China National Grain and Oils Information Centre (CNGOIC) estimated May imports could jump to 4.8 million tonnes. China's commerce ministry earlier said it expected imports in May to be flat from the year-ago period or about 4.4 million tonnes. The poor crushing margins was partly because of Beijing's release of state edible oil and soya reserves, aiming to cool food inflation, which helped drive up the country's inflation to 32-month high in March.
Beijing has released 1.77 million tonnes of state rapeseed oil since October. The same volume of cooking oil would require about 9 million tonnes of soyabeans. Recently the government released 3 million tonnes of domestic soya reserves to some crushers that had been asked to freeze their retail soyaoil prices.
The move has also prompted many crushers to try to defer or cancel their previously booked soya cargoes. "Continuing negative crushing margins in China have caused their soyabean imports to decline year-on-year in February and March. We expect this will continue to pressure China's soyabean imports and forecast China will import 55 million tonnes of soyabeans - 2 million tonnes lower than the USDA's current forecast," Rabobank said in a report to clients last week.
But still the forecast for 2010/2011 imports - or 55 million tonnes- was higher than 50.34 million tonnes for 2009/2010 as crushing capacity expansion coupled with rigid demand for the cooking oil and meat continues to spur imports. Imports of vegetable oils, including palmoil, soyaoil and rapeseed oil, in April totalled 490,000 tonnes, up 53.1 percent from the previous month, according to the Customs data. It did not provide breakdown, but details will be available later in the month.