PALM
OIL - AGRICULTURE
News: India's palm oil imports rose 29% in
Nov.-Sept. of 2022-23 oil year: SEA
What's
in the news?
●
India's palm oil imports jumped 29.21% to
90.80 lakh tonne in the first 11 months of the ongoing 2022–23 oil year
compared with the year-earlier period, with RBD Palmolien shipments rising
fast, posing a serious threat to the domestic refiners.
Key
takeaways:
●
India,
the world's leading vegetable oil buyer, imported 70.28 lakh
tonnes of palm oil products during the same period in the previous oil year.
●
India imports palm oil mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia and a small
quantity of crude soft oil, including soybean from Argentina. Sunflower oil is
imported from Ukraine and Russia.
Palm
Oil:
●
Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil derived from the mesocarp (reddish pulp) of
the fruit of the oil palms.
●
Along with coconut oil, palm oil is one of
the few highly saturated vegetable fats and is semisolid at room temperature.
Features:
●
It is resistant
to oxidation and so can give products a longer shelf-life; it’s stable at high temperatures.
●
It is used in food manufacturing, in
beauty products and as biofuel.
●
Its use in the commercial food industry in
other parts of the world is widespread because of its lower cost.
●
Virgin palm oil is rich in carotenoids (pro Vitamin A), tocotrienols and tocopherols
(Vitamin E).
Producers:
Top
Producers:
●
Indonesia
●
Malaysia
●
Thailand
Importers:
●
India
●
European Union
●
China
India
and Palm Oil:
●
In India, oil palm is being cultivated in
13 states. Potential states are Andhra
Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Bihar.
●
Andhra Pradesh (83.5 percent) along with
Telangana accounts for about 97 percent of India's 278,000 tonnes of crude palm
oil production.
National
Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm (NMEO-OP):
●
It is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme with a special focus on the Northeast region and the Andaman and
Nicobar Islands.
●
The Mission hopes to increase oil palm
acreage by an additional 6.5 lakh hectares by 2025-26 and grow production of
crude palm oil to 11.2 lakh tonnes by 2025-26 and up to 28 lakh tonnes by
2029-30.
●
The proposed scheme will subsume the
current National Food Security Mission-Oil Palm programme.
Focus
area:
●
The oil palm farmers produce Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFBs) from which
oil is extracted by the industry. Presently the prices of these FFBs are linked
to the international Crude Palm Oil (CPO) prices fluctuations.
●
Viability
Price (VP): For the first time, the Government of
India will give price assurance to the oil palm farmers for the FFBs in the
form of the Viability Price (VP).