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Eye-Watering Palm Oil Price Sees India Turn to Sunflower Oil

Palm oil purchases by India, world’s biggest importer of the commodity, fell to a five-month low in November due to searing prices

Eye-Watering Palm Oil Price Sees India Turn to Sunflower Oil
Bags of imported palmolein oil are stored at a warehouse of a cooking oil wholesaler in Mumbai, India. (Photographer: Kuni Takahashi/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) --

Palm oil’s searing rally likely forced many buyers from India to the sidelines in November, with purchases by the world’s biggest importer dropping to a five-month low. Sunflower oil imports jumped.

Shipments of palm oil shrank almost 11% from a month earlier to 696,000 tons, a second month of decline and the lowest since June, according to the median of five estimates in a Bloomberg survey of processors, brokers and analysts. Imports totaled 691,827 tons in November last year. The Solvent Extractors’ Association of India may release its data next week.

Eye-Watering Palm Oil Price Sees India Turn to Sunflower Oil

The world’s most-consumed cooking oil has soared about 50% since the middle of July on concerns about falling output and growing demand for biofuel, making shipments expensive for the South Asian nation. Lower purchases by India may boost inventories in top producers Indonesia and Malaysia, and potentially put a lid on prices.

“The speed at which prices rose wasn’t expected by the market,” said G. G. Patel, managing partner of GGN Research, an agricultural research company. “The disparity in prices was huge and that reduced imports.”

Futures climbed to the highest intraday level since early 2017 this week, and hovered near that Thursday. Palm also hit parity with soybean oil for the first time since 2011, which reduced its appeal compared with other oils. The tropical oil has traded at a average discount of $112 a ton over the past year.

While soybean oil purchases, mostly from the U.S., Brazil and Argentina, slumped about 58% from a month earlier to 166,000 tons, sunflower oil imports jumped 62% to 258,000 tons, the survey showed. Total vegetable oil imports dropped about 21% to 1.09 million tons, according to the survey.

ImportsNov. 2019 (Survey)Oct. 2019 (SEA)Nov. 2018 (SEA)
Palm oil696,000778,568691,827
Soybean oil166,000394,086203,734
Sunflower oil258,000159,272165,550
Total vegetable oil1,089,0001,378,1041,133,893

NOTE: Figures in metric tons

To contact the reporter on this story: Pratik Parija in New Delhi at pparija@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anna Kitanaka at akitanaka@bloomberg.net, Atul Prakash, James Poole

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.