Palm oil production in Colombia will climb to a record this year as trees planted three years ago start to bear fruit, Oil World said.
Colombian output of palm oil, used for cooking and to make biofuel, will climb to 1.15 million metric tons in 2014 from 1.04 million tons last year, the Hamburg-based researcher said in a report. Surplus production means exports may jump 30 percent to 240,000 tons, while demand from the domestic biodiesel industry is “largely exhausted for the time being,” it said. Colombia is the world’s fourth largest palm oil producer, after Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“This year’s high production is primarily due to high yields obtained from new oil palms coming in production,” Oil World said. “Additional plantings with varieties resistant to the spear-rot disease have taken place in recent years.”
Indonesia’s palm oil exports totaled 8.37 million tons from January through May, 6.6 percent less than at the same time last year while still the second-highest on record, Oil World said. Exports remained high as domestic biodiesel production “did not expand as sharply as envisioned so far this year,” it said.
Indonesia boosted coconut oil exports to 324,000 tons in the first five months of this year from 261,000 tons in the same period last year after Typhoon Rammasun damaged trees in the Philippines last month, it said. The Philippines and Indonesia are the two biggest coconut oil producers.
At least 10 percent of coconut trees in the Philippines were partially damaged by the typhoon, and 1.5 million trees, representing about 0.4 percent of the country’s coconut area, were totally destroyed, Oil World said, citing estimates from the Philippine Coconut Authority. Coconut oil prices in Rotterdam rose to $1,345 a ton last week from $1,210 on July 10, with the premium over palm oil widening to $510 a ton from $355 a ton, it said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Claudia Carpenter in London at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net Whitney McFerron, Dan Weeks
Source : Bloomberg
