India’s rapeseed meal exports will help China, the world’s top consumer, replace imports from Canada while easing pressure on local rapeseed prices in India where there are large stockpiles of the widely used animal feed.
“Indian rapeseed meal is very competitive compared to other origins. That’s why China has been increasing purchases since March,” B.V. Mehta, executive director of the Solvent Extractors’ Association of India, told Reuters.
India’s rapeseed meal exports to China are likely to jump to a record 500,000 metric tons in the 2025/26 marketing year which started in April, up from the last year’s 60,759 tons, Mehta said.
In the first two months of 2025/26, India exported 113,836 tons of rapeseed meal to China, which imposed a 100% retaliatory tariff on rapeseed meal and oil imports from Canada starting on March 20.
In 2024, China imported 2.02 million metric tons of rapeseed meal from Canada, 504,000 tons from the United Arab Emirates, and 135,000 tons from Russia, according to customs data. It bought 13,100 tons from India. India, the world’s third-largest rapeseed producer, had struggled to export significant amounts of rapeseed meal to China because of higher prices in the past. But now India is offering rapeseed meal at around $202 per ton on a free-on-board (FOB) basis compared to around $300 for supplies from the European Union, traders said.
“China has emerged as the biggest buyer of Indian rapeseed meal from nowhere. It is buying more than 50,000 tons every month,” said one of the leading exporters.
South Korea, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Vietnam traditionally account for the bulk of India’s rapeseed meal exports.
India badly needs edible oils to fulfill local demand amid lower imports in the past few months, said the exporter.
“Higher rapeseed crushing because of Chinese demand for meal is improving rapeseed oil supplies,” he said.
India, the world’s biggest importer of vegetable oils, buys palm oil mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia, while it imports soyoil and sunflower oil from Argentina, Brazil, Russia and Ukraine.
