12/12/2007 (Commodity Online), Kochi - Kerala, popularly known as God’s Own Country these days, originally got the state’s name from the coconut tree. “Kera” in Malayalam language means Coconut and “Alam” means Land; and thus “Keralam” became the Land of Coconut.

But these days, the Land of Coconut is fighting a battle to preserve the indigenous brand of Coconut Oil. On the other side of the battle is Palm Oil, mainly imported from countries like Malaysia.

Kerala has been producing more than enough of the multi purpose coconut oil for long, until the oil with medicinal properties began to fade away and other states took baton from the state.

Even during the peak time, coconut farmers never got any benefits which were rightly theirs by they were laboriously producing the coconut oil. Instead, the middlemen took all the honours and most of the wealth the sector offered at that time.

Coconut oil was in such a demand that, more than two decades ago the prices skyrocketed and artificial scarcity was created in the market. That forced the state government then to import palm oil, an unknown commodity for most of Keralites at that time, from Malaysia.

People liked the new brand of edible oil as its taste was almost like their own coconut oil and was available cheaply through public distribution system.

The government might have then thought that this could push down coconut oil price.

But the move to import palm oil went against the nearly four million coconut farmers in the state as they were denied even marginal profit from their produce. But for the general public, it was a great relief as it saved a lot of their money.

However, these days, the consumers and farmers are protesting against palm oil. For consumers, the palm oil price (the wide gap in the prices of palm oil and coconut oil has narrowed down) doesn’t gave them any relief. And for the farmers, palm oil still continues to be a threat to the coconut oil.

During the past 25 years or so the price of coconut has been hovering around Rs 4-7 per nut, while other crops' price went up many folds during this period. This gives an impression to farmers, and the state government that palm oil makes the coconut oil slippery in the market.

The Kerala government has now requested the Central government to ban import of palm oil through all South Indian ports. The Central government, however, is reluctant to concede the state’s demand.

Paradoxically, the state government which had given a red carpet welcome to palm oil years back is now struggling hard to boot it out .Kerala consumes 2.5 lakh tonne of palm oil in a year as against 1.5 lakh tonne of coconut oil.

In other words, over 60 percent of households, almost all hotels, restaurants, bakery and chip frying units use palm oil.

Apart from palm oil, lot of coconut oil is coming to Kerala from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh which have entered the coconut farming in a big way. So banning of palm oil or in that matter any other edible oil in the state, will not be a remedy for the malady afflicting the coconut sector in God’s Own Country.