After the war disrupted Ukrainian supplies and Indonesia banned palm oil exports, India looked at new markets for its needs.

17/05/2022 (Al Jazeera), Bengaluru, India - Aneesha Thakur has used sunflower oil in her kitchen for as long as she can remember. Last week, she broke with that habit, buying a bottle of soybean oil instead to fry fish for her teenage sons.

The neighbourhood supermarket, which usually has rows stacked with sunflower oil brands, had none of the major ones when she visited, she said. So Thakur, a sales executive, settled on what she thought was the next best option. “They’re always hungry, and thankfully, they liked it,” she told Al Jazeera, referring to her children.

They might not have too much of a choice for the next few months.

Ukraine is the world’s biggest exporter of sunflower oil and India is its largest market.

Russia’s invasion of its eastern neighbour has forced India — overall the world’s biggest importer of edible oils — to look to Argentina and Brazil, thousands of kilometres away, for help to keep its kitchen economics afloat.

Between November and March, India bought 45 percent more soybean oil than last year from the two biggest exporters of the commodity, according to data from the Solvent Extractors Association of India, an industry body. That includes a nearly sevenfold spike in purchases from Brazil. The dependence on the South American nations has only grown after Indonesia banned palm oil exports in late April to guard against supply shortages at home.

But a rare confluence of poor harvests, on top of the war, means that even this frenzied buying will likely fail to quench India’s thirst for edible oils, experts are warning. Brazil and Argentina are experiencing droughts that are expected to hurt their harvests. And Canada, the world’s biggest producer of canola oil — an alternative India might have considered — had its worst yield in 14 years in 2021, also because of a drought. Seeding has just started for this season.

“Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, and all together,” Mintak Joo, a veteran edible oils research analyst at Gro Intelligence, a New York-based agricultural consulting firm, told Al Jazeera.

For Indian families, the challenge is real. By end-April, refined palm oil was 27 percent costlier than a year ago, and crude soybean oil was 22 percent more expensive. For New Delhi, that is a political problem too — food prices have brought governments down in the past.

‘Consequences of conflict’

At the government-backed Raisina Dialogue, India’s premier strategic affairs conclave where security, war and alliances are the staple diet, edible oils made an entry in April. Argentinian Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero was a guest at the conclave, and Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar nodded to the growing role of oil as a catalyst in their ties, especially in the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. “These are interesting globalisation consequences of conflicts,” Jaishankar said. “Argentina has emerged as one of our biggest sources of edible oils.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/5/17/can-brazil-and-argentina-satiate-indias-food-oil-hunger