Subhanwita Goswami
The palm oil imports of India has seen a very marginal rise to 5.90 lakhs in the month of June,2022 against 5.87 lakhs in the month of June, a year ago. India is one of the leading importers of vegetable oil in the world.
In contrast to the vegetable oil imports, the imports and shipments of RBD palmolein oil has shown different trends in the graph, according to the data released by Solvent Extractors Association (SEA) on Wednesday.
The Indian Government on May 24, issued permission to import 20 lakh crude soyabean oil and sunflower oil at zero duty for 2022-23 and 2023-24 according to the applied rules of TRQ. But the TRQ system has certain limitations to the volume of imports and charges are applied for beyond those specified limits.
Therefore, the SEA has put forward a demand to the government to increase the limit quotas to enable duty charges-free import of crude oils. They have also proposed that this step would increase the domestic availability.
The SEA in its statement said, “The TRQ licenses are issued based on refining capacity contrary to last three years performance as notified in the first notification of 10th June,2022, leaving many actually processing companies receiving very less quota”. Talking about the sharp increase in RBD palmolein shipments, it further added, “Import of RBD palmolein… jumped mainly due to high export levy on CPO and lower duty on RBD palmolein favored Indonesian exporters to discount RBD palmolein to push RBD palmolein export”.
