India’s vegetable oil imports jumped 33% to 11,08,67 tonnes in April against 8,32,760 tonnes during the same month last year, due to higher shipments of palm oil. Increase in prices of soyabean in domestic market and lesser realisation for oil and soyabean meal in export market, resulted in lower crushing and lesser oil availability in the country, which further led to higher imports.
Meanwhile, during November-April period, vegetable oils imports increased by 25% to 64.61 lakh tonnes compared with 51.64 lakh tonnes in the year-ago period. Of total imports in November-April period, imports of edible oils stood at 6.3 million tonnes and non-edible oils at 112,000 tonnes.
In December last year, the government had hiked import duty on both crude and refined edible oils by 5%.The customs duty on crude oil was increased to 7.5% from 2.5% earlier, while the duty on refined edible oil was raised to 15% from 10%.