India's edible oil cos scouting for land abroad

NEW DELHI – A consortium of 14 top vegetable oil companies are planning to lease or buy land in Paraguay, Uruguay and Myanmar to grow oils seeds and lentils as farmland available shrinks in India. With lot of agricultural land being converted for commercial use and therefore availability of land is not large enough to take up oil seeds cultivation. Recently, the Union Government had banned exports of edible oil and cut import duties to tame inflation cause by rising food prices. India consumes 18 million tonnes of lentils and imports from Myanmar, Tanzania, Australia, Canada and Ukraine to bridge a shortfall of about 4 million tonnes of the protein-rich food. It also imports almost half of the 11 million tonnes or so of edible oil it consumes, and buys palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia and soyoil from Brazil and Argentina. Some importers are reportedly buying oil palm plantations in Indonesia, the world's top palm oil producer, according to a Reuters report that quoted Ashok Sethia, President of Solvent Extractors Association of India. The report said that public sector State Trading Corporation is also in the consortium of companies planning to buy or lease land for cultivation abroad. The consortium has formed a special purpose vehicle with a corpus of Rs 2 bn, the Reuters report added.The idea of the importers is to grow oilseeds in other countries and import into India. _NDTV