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Sunflowerseed stocks continue to remain tight in the EU, and are currently estimated at 0.2Mt, well below the previous year's ending stocks of 0.5Mt. This is mainly due to last year's steep decline in production in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia which saw combined production of sunflowerseed decrease from 3.78Mt to 2.31Mt. This along with lower crushings and insufficient imports from non-EU countries has seen sun oil commanding higher premiums relative to other vegetable oils.
However, exports of sun oil are starting to pick up in key exporting countries. The Ukraine, which was forecast to export around 1.36 Mt of sun oil in 2007/08 has so far used just 0.3Mt of the available export quotas, while exports from Argentina are likely to increase to around 0.17Mt in April following a higher than expected sunflowerseed harvest. As a result world exports of sun oil will probably exceed expectations in April/Sept 2008 with some of this filtering into the EU over the coming weeks. | |
