India is a nation that has about 1.39 billion mouths to feed, and hence logically is a nation that requires a lot of edible cooking oil like palm oil. It is the oil that is mostly used by developing countries as cooking oil.
This has, in turn, made India one of the biggest importers of palm oil in the Asian subcontinent.
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently forecasted that the Indian import of palm oil will increase to a staggering 8.6 million tonnes in the November 2021- October 2022 season. This number is higher by 3 million tonnes than the previous estimate of 5.6 million.
This mounting need for palm oil in India has actually helped nations like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as it has actually increased the amount imported from these nations a lot.
This makes India very dependent on these nations for crude palm oil which becomes a liability when there is either a political row between the nations (like in the case of Malaysia in Jan 2020) or when suddenly some of these nations want to stop the exports of crude palm oil in favour of exporting them as finished products (October 13 case of Indonesia).
Hence Indian commerce ministry has actually recently tried to increase the domestic production of palm oil and 101 other items to help them to cut imports on them.
India currently produces palm oil on more than 300,000 hectares (741,316 acres) of land and wants to expand to 650,000 (160,6184 acres) by 2025-26 to deal with the mounting Crude palm oil demand.
The Growing Need for edible cooking oil by the ‘Indian population is something that India needs to combat as soon as possible as it’s also taking a big toll on the Indian import bill.
