03/10/2011 (Business Standard) - Palm oil production in the country is expected to go up substantially with the Union government allocating Rs 300 crore in the 2011-12 Budget for stepping up its cultivation and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) gearing up to bring an additional 60,000 hectare annually for the next 15 years under oil palm plantations.

ICAR’s Directorate of Oil Palm Research (DPR) has targeted to bring 1 million hectare in 14 states under palm oil plantations by 2025, as against an area of 164,000 hectare at present. Following this, palm oil production in the country is expected to go up to over 5 million tonne a year as against 600,000 tonne last year.

Currently, apart from oil palm, the nine oilseeds – groundnut, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, sesamum, safflower, castor, niger and linseed – grown in over 36 million hectare in the country are unable to meet the demand for edible oil. Consequently, India is mainly dependent on imports to meet its requirement

According to DPR project director S Aluraj, the country had imported 7 million tonne of edible oil last year at a cost of Rs 17,000 crore to meet the domestic demand. The requirement for edible oil is expected to touch 21.3 million tonne by 2015 as the growth in demand is pegged at 6 per cent per year.

In order to bring down edible oil imports in future, the Centre had come forward to encourage oil palm cultivation in a large scale. It had identified large tracts of land in Gujarat, Orissa, Karnataka, Mizoram and Andhra Pradesh where oil palm plantations could be developed.

Aluraj told Business Standard that there were nearly 25 palm oil processing units in the country, which were currently working at less than 50 per cent capacity. Hence, processing would not be a problem if the production of palm kernels increased substantially.