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Amid rising imports of vegetable oils, the Food Ministry will review the Customs duty on edible oils and prepare a Cabinet note in this regard.
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar and Food Minister K.V. Thomas today met to review edible oil imports, status of wheat exports and sale of wheat under the open market sale scheme.
“I met Finance Minister and Agriculture Minister and briefed them about edible oil imports, wheat exports and OMSS,” Food Minister told reporters after the meeting here, but declined to share further details.
However, according to sources, the Food Ministry has been asked to review the duty structure on edible oils, both crude and refined, and then send a Cabinet note in this regard. The Ministry would then formulate a duty structure, keeping in view the interest of both consumers and farmers.
At present, there is zero duty on crude edible oil and 7.5 per cent on refined edible oil. India imported a record 10.19 million tonnes of vegetable oils in 2011-12. Last month, the imports were up by 35 per cent to over 9 lakh tonnes.
Sources said that the Agriculture Ministry is in favour of hiking the import duty on edible oils, as higher import of edible oils has affected the farmers and oilseed processing units.
However, the Finance and Food Ministries are against it as they fear that raising the Custom duty would lead to a rise in the retail prices of cooking oil.
The Ministers also discussed ways to reduce the country’s import dependence on edible oils. Currently, India imports more than half of its domestic requirement.
Besides edible oils, they also discussed the sale of wheat to bulk consumers such as flour millers and biscuit makers under OMSS. The Food Ministry is preparing a proposal to cut wheat prices under the scheme to boost sales.
On wheat exports, the Government may consider allowing further shipments from its stocks. Already, the Centre has allowed 4.5 million tonnes of wheat from FCI godowns to clear the surplus stock and ease storage crunch.
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