The Oilseed Oil Producers Association in Bulgaria (OOPAB) insists that sunflower imports from Ukraine should not be limited, OOPAB President Yani Yanev told a BTA-hosted news conference here on Wednesday.
According to the Association, cooking oil enterprises in Bulgaria have the capacity to process 4 million tonnes of sunflower seed annually, but local farmers can supply only 2-2.5 million tonnes. Therefore, processing plants count on imports, which until recently came mainly from Russia and Ukraine. Sunflower oil and meal plants risk going out of operation if sunflower seed imports are banned, OOPAB said.
According to Yanev, Bulgaria has a stock of 600,000 tonnes of sunflower seed from last year's crop, and processors are willing to buy it at market prices. "We can also pay the market price for the new crop which is being harvested from the fields right now," he added. Only a small part of the sunflower seed produced in this country goes towards local consumption. About 250,000 tonnes of seed is enough to meet domestic demand for sunflower oil. A price hike for sunflower oil is out of the question, OOPAB said.
It went on to note that cooking oil producers are ready to pay BGN 800 for a tonne of sunflower seed, which is a little over the international price level. Growers are asking BGN 1,000 per tonne.
Ukraine is expected to produce 14 million tonnes of sunflower seed this year and to export only 1 million tonnes of it, leaving the rest to be processed in local plants, Yanev said. He warned of a structural problem looming for Bulgarian processors. One way to address it is to expand oil-bearing crop farming in this country, he suggested.
Yanev predicted a low sunflower seed yield in Bulgaria this year. He forecast an average yield of between 1 and 1.5 tonnes per hectare, compared with the usual 2.3 to 2.5 tonnes.
/RY/
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