Russia’s sunflower oil exports
to China are set to double in the new marketing year, but at
discounted prices, a leading Russian exporter said on Thursday,
as war has damaged the country’s port infrastructure and
disrupted shipments to top buyer India.
The world’s biggest producer and exporter of sunflower seeds has struggled to ship sunflower oil from its Black Sea ports because of infrastructure bottlenecks, even as demand from India remains strong, said Kyrylo Tyshkevych, head of trading at Sodrugestvo Group, one of Russia’s top three producers.
Russian and Ukrainian attacks on ports in the Black Sea
region in recent weeks have disrupted loading operations at
ports used to ship grains and vegetable oils.
Russian exporters are offering sunflower oil to China via
land routes, at a discount, with purchases expected to double to
1 million metric tons in the marketing year that began September
1, Tyshkevych said on the sidelines of the Globoil conference in
Mumbai.
Shipments to India, which go by sea, are expected to decline to 1.1 million tons this year, from 1.5 million tons a year earlier, he said.
Russia’s sunflower seed production is expected to rise to 20
million tons this year from 17.5 million tons last year, he
said.
But weak export demand is expected to curb crushing, leaving
the country with carryover stocks of 3 million tons of seeds at
the start of the next marketing year, he said.
Like Russia, Ukraine, the world’s second-largest sunflower
oil supplier, has also been struggling to ship the oil to India,
leading to lower sunflower seed crushing, said a Ukrainian
sunflower oil exporter whose terminal in the Odesa region was
damaged in Russian attacks.
Ukraine typically crushes around 600,000 tons of sunflower
seeds each month between October and March, but crushing is
expected to halve this year as mills face difficulties exporting
sunflower oil, the exporter said. He declined to be named due to
the ongoing conflict.
Sunflower oil, produced mainly in the Black Sea region,
competes with palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia and soyoil
from South America.