A New Mission

Context: The government’s move to set up a Rs 11,000-crore oilseeds mission to make the country self-sufficient in edible oils is an initiative that should have been taken much earlier.

Need for an oilseeds mission

• Chronic shortage: India has been chronically short of edible oils, an essential item of mass consumption, since the mid-1990s. 
• Misplace policy priorities: The casual bids made in the past to spur domestic oilseeds production could not make much headway for want of appropriate pricing policies, which, most often, tended to over-protect consumer interests, disregarding those of the producers. 
• Unsustainable import dependence: Due to the supply deficit, India, the world’s largest importer of cooking oils, meeting 70 %requirement of oils through shipments from abroad. 
• The unsustainability of these imports has begun to pinch all the more because of the recent spurt in global vegetable oil prices in the wake of demand growth and supply stagnation.

Significance of oilseeds mission

• Boost oilseeds output: The proposed mission would be expected to boost oilseeds output by providing the growers with the needed inputs, technology, and know-how.
• Mini-kits of seeds of new high-yielding and disease- and pest-tolerant strains of various oilseed crops, including groundnut and soybean, are planned to be distributed to the farmers.
• Crop diversification: The overall acreage under oilseed crops is proposed to be expanded in non-traditional vegetable oil-growing areas by promoting their mixed cropping with pulses.

Challenges with the oilseeds mission

• Deforestation: While it encourages oil palm cultivation in Northeastern states and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is conducive (due to climatic convergence); however, private investors are doing so by cutting down forests, which is untenable.
• Domestic pricing: Imported prices are kept low by frequently rejigging their duty structure and hurt any initiative aimed at incentivising indigenous production.

Way Forward

• Incentivising indigenous production: The success of any strategy to enhance domestic edible oil availability would succeed only if the oil producers are assured of remunerative returns for their output.
• Tapping untapped potential: 
  • Cottonseed oil and rice bran oil: India is the world’s second-largest producer of rice. But only a fraction of it is utilised to extract oil during its processing. So is the case with cottonseeds.
  • Livestock feed: A substantial part of these seeds is fed to livestock without extracting its oil. The proposed oilseeds mission would do well to look into this aspect as well.