KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (July 1): The Indian government has lifted an 18-month ban on the import of refined palm oil products, allowing Malaysia to export more refined, bleached, and deodorized (RBD) palm oil to India. “This is fantastic news for us, and we hope to be able to export more red palm oil (RPO) to India today,” Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) director-general Dr Ahmad Parveez Ghulam Kadir told Bernama. RPO has the same fatty acid composition as RBD palm oil.
He stated that from 2010 to 2018, Malaysia shipped an average of 550,000 tonnes of RPO to India, with exports increasing to 2.6 million tonnes in 2019.
The Malaysia-India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement, which granted Malaysian RPO a 5% tax advantage over Indonesian RPO, was responsible for this.
“Unfortunately, we were only able to export 150,000 tonnes of RPO after the ban was imposed on January 8, 2020,” he stated.
Imports of RBD palm olein are now allowed without limits till the end of the year, according to a notification issued by the Indian Ministry of Commerce’s Directorate General of Foreign Trade yesterday.
The Indian government announced earlier this week that it would lower the import duty on crude palm oil (CPO) from 15% to 10%.
CPO exports to the world’s largest palm oil consumer are expected to rise further in the near future, according to the MPOB, at current prices of RM3,500 to RM3,800 per tonne.
Malaysian palm oil shipments to India climbed by more than eightfold to 1.29 million tonnes from January to May 2021, according to MPOB data, up from 0.15 million tonnes in the same period in 2020./n
