German rapeseed oil exports fell 15 per cent

In Germany, UFOP reports that German exports of rapeseed oil shrank for the second year running in the 2018/19 marketing year. Above all, demand from some EU member states dropped sharply.

German exports of rapeseed oil slowed considerably in 2018/19 compared to the previous year and even decreased by as much as one third compared to 2016/17. In the past marketing year, only 860,700 tonnes of rapeseed oil were sold abroad. This translates to a 15 per cent decline from 2017/18. In other words, exports dropped to the lowest level in seven years. Agrarmarkt Informations-Gesellschaft mbH (AMI) has suggested that the reason for the slowdown is probably the lower availability of feedstock, which was even scarcer in 2018 than it had been in 2017.

The largest volumes went to the Netherlands, the hub of international trade, which received around 491,700 tonnes. However, this was down 14 per cent year-on-year. Poland, which had been the second most important purchaser of German rapeseed oil in the preceding five years, slid to fourth place, based on a 60 per cent decline in 2018/19. The decrease could be due to the rise in Polish production of rapeseed oil. Poland was displaced by Belgium in 2018/19, which imported 85,400 tonnes of rapeseed oil, around 22 per cent more than a year earlier. Demand from the EFTA states (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland) had already slumped 66 percent in 2017/18, but almost halved again to 15,200 tonnes in 2018/19. The reason was a two-thirds decline in Norway’s demand for imports to 6,000 tonnes. On the other hand, Great Britain doubled its imports of German rapeseed oil to 11,200 tonnes.