Indonesia: faced with soaring palm oil prices, its export is now suspended

A palm oil plantation in Jambi, Indonesia.

© Cifor

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

With less than two weeks to go until the traditional end of Ramadan feast, Indonesia's raging cooking oil shortage has become explosive.

For the second time since the beginning of the year, Indonesia is therefore suspending the export of this commodity, because very paradoxically, at the world's leading producer, palm oil has become extremely expensive or out of stock.

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With our correspondent in Kuala Lumpur

,

It is a crisis that has already caused deaths and injuries, in March an Indonesian woman died in an endless queue and under a blazing sun while trying to buy cooking oil .

And protests against

last week saw

and police officers badly injured.

The causes of this shortage are not always as unpredictable as it seems.

Admittedly, the war between Ukraine and Russia, the two leading producers of sunflower oil, inevitably caused a rise in palm oil prices.

But the shortage of fertilizers and poor weather conditions also affected Indonesian yields.

Palm oil affected by corruption cases

Facts of corruption under investigation have also allowed some industrial giants to continue to export outside the limits set by the government since the beginning of the year.

Players in the sector have also been able to voluntarily store large quantities of oil to drive up prices, as shown by the discovery of warehouses full of palm oil on the island of Sumatra at the end of February.

Finally, palm oil, under government incentives, has been increasingly channeled to produce biofuel to the detriment of its food use.

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