Pakistan Oilseed Production Expected to Rise

The production of edible oils meets only one-fourth of the domestic demand while the country depends on imports to meet three-fourths of its needs. However, in the last few years local oilseed crushing has picked up pace brightening prospects for higher domestic output. But in the current marketing year the country will still have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on import of oilseeds.

If the private sector edible oil refineries and the government join hands, a part of the precious foreign exchange can be saved.

The edible oil imports during marketing year are forecast to grow to 2.16 million tonnes from 2.05 million tonnes imported in MY11. Growers of all three oilseeds i.e. cottonseed, sunflower seed and rapeseed know that they lack modern techniques of oil extraction from seeds and their preservation, for marketing. Because they either do not have enough money to spend on acquisition of technologies or simply because their priorities are different, they continue with the centuries’ old methods of working.

Edible oil refining companies and the government can set up pool of resources to help growers in this regard. After all, availability of larger quantities of oilseeds would eventually benefit edible oil refineries in terms of increased availability, and benefit public exchequer through reduction in import bills.

But even before that, two other things need to be done: growers should be assisted in modern farming methods through on-farm-training as well as through supply of new technologies so that they can increase per acre yield.

According to a latest USDA report Pakistan's total production of oilseeds would rise by 24 percent to 5.58 million tonnes during MY12. But the country would still have to import 1.3 million tonnes of oilseeds to meet crushing requirements of domestic refineries.

Officials of domestic oil refineries have started purchasing local oilseeds through their agents. Growers say they want to sell their produce direct to refineries under any system devised by refineries, because they think that the procurement agents of refineries buy their produce at very cheap prices and ask them to sign selling documents, showing much-higher prices cheating both the refineries and the growers.

In recent years, the country produced more of cottonseed because its cotton output has been on the rise, though still short of its requirement till the last fiscal year. During this fiscal year, cotton output is projected to be somewhere between 13.5-14 million bales, higher than that of 12.8 million bales last year. In line with it would grow the production of cottonseed to be used in edible oil extraction.