Ukraine is considering extending sunflower oil export quotas to September 1 from July 1 and an increase in the volume to 500,000 tonnes from 300,000, a newspaper said on Tuesday. Ekonomicheskiye Izvestiya daily said the quotas, yet to be distributed, had already prompted several large sunoil producers to halt operations as they had no space to store oil.
The director of the sunoil producers' union UkrOliyaProm, Stepan Kapshuk, last week said export quotas might cause a shutdown of at least 15 of 23 large Ukrainian sunoil plants.
Ukraine consumes about 500,000 tonnes of sunoil per season and despite a significant surplus the government limited sunoil exports to 300,000 tonnes in the period from March 22 to July 1, 2008 in order to keep local prices stable. Sunoil exports reached a record 1.874 million tonnes in the 2006/07 season and Ukraine has exported 987,341 tonnes so far this season compared with 1.03 million in the same period in 2006/07.