India's edible oil imports, including palm oil, may rise 5.4 percent to 11.7 million tonnes in the year to October 2015 as a weak monsoon hurts domestic oilseeds production, an industry expert said on Thursday. Higher purchases by the world's leading cooking oil importer should in the long term support benchmark Malaysian palm oil futures that have shed 7 percent so far this year.
"Considering current monsoon progress, I don't think next year there will be any meaningful growth in local edible oil supplies, but demand will rise," Govindbhai Patel, a trade expert from India's western city of Rajkot, said at a regional palm oil conference in Mumbai. India's annual rains have covered half of its landmass four days behind the usual schedule, failing to recover from a late start that has slowed sowing of summer crops in a country where half of the farmland still lacks irrigation.
Production of the main summer oilseed crop would depend on the quantity of rainfall in the next two months, said Patel, who has been in the edible oil trade for more than four decades. India is expected to import on an average 1.05 million tonnes of edible oil, including 700,000 tonnes of palm oil, each month until the end of the current year in October, said Patel, a managing partner at GG Patel & Nikhil Research Co. In May, India shipped in 1.02 million tonnes of edible oil, including 654,255 tonnes of palm oil.
Dorab Mistry, who heads the vegetable oil trading arm at India's Godrej Industries, also expects the country's edible oil imports to rise in the next five months due to a delay in soyabean sowing.
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