India's overseas purchases of edible oil in the year starting November are set to surge to a record 13 million tonnes, an executive at key importer Ruchi Soya said, as lower prices, rising population and higher incomes boost consumption. Higher purchases by India, the world's top importer of cooking oils, could support benchmark Malaysian palm oil futures that hit a five-year low earlier this month and have shed almost a fifth of their value so far in 2014.
Of the estimated total 2014/15 Indian imports, more than 9 million tonnes will be palm oil, Dinesh Shahra, managing director of Ruchi Soya Industries Ltd, India's biggest edible oil buyer, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. In the current year, edible oil imports are pegged at 11.6 million tonnes, including 8 million tonnes of palm oil, he said. India imported a record 10.4 million tonnes of edible oils in the 2012/13 year, data from Mumbai-based industry body Solvent Extractors' Association of India (SEA) showed.
Rising population, increasing prosperity and less-than-satisfactory monsoon rains would boost next year's edible oil imports, B. V. Mehta, executive director of the SEA said ahead of a global vegetable oils conference starting Friday. "Our per capita consumption is going up by 3-4 percent every year and our population is expanding at 22 million every year. That in itself leads to an increase of 300,000 tonnes in vegetable oils consumption," Mehta said. Area under soybean and groundnut, key summer-sown crops, fell this year due to an 11 percent drop in rainfall since the start of the monsoon season on June 1.
Indian farmers plant soybean in the rainy months of June and July, with harvests from October. Rapeseed, the main winter oilseed crop, is sown from October and harvested from March. Nearly 60 percent of India's annual edible oil demand of 18-19 million tonnes is met by imports, consisting mainly of palm oil sourced from Indonesia and Malaysia. India also buys tiny amounts of soyoil from Latin America and sunflower oil from the Black Sea region.