India Bought a Record Amount of Soyoil in August, and 90,000 Tonnes of It Never Crossed a Port
Indian refiners imported 1.54 million tonnes of edible oil in August on dealer estimates, an eleven-month high. Soyoil jumped 21% on the month to a record 601,000 tonnes, palm rose 7% to 780,000 tonnes and sunflower oil fell 38% to a six-month low of 157,000 tonnes. Separately, and excluded from those figures, roughly 100,000 tonnes arrived duty-free overland from Nepal — including about 90,000 tonnes of soyoil.
That last paragraph is the one worth sitting with. It means the real August number is closer to 1.64 million tonnes, and that a sixth of India's record soyoil intake bypassed the customs schedule entirely.
The headline data first
The substitution the market has been anticipating since July has now printed. Palm at a six-month peak and soyoil at an all-time high tell you that refiners restocked hard into the festival window; sunflower at a six-month low tells you why they had to.
Two things drove the buying. Festival demand runs from August to November and refiners were building stock against it. And the forward curve helped: nearby deliveries were priced below deferred months, which removes the incentive to wait and pulls purchasing forward. When prompt is cheaper than deferred in an import-dependent market, you get exactly this — a front-loaded month.
Soyoil took the lion's share for two separate reasons that happened to align. It was simply cheaper than palm on a delivered basis, which is unusual and which flipped the normal substitution logic on its head. And Black Sea sunflower shipments remain disrupted by the war, leaving southern buyers who would normally take sunflower with nowhere else to go.
Our own August projections had soyoil near 620,000 tonnes and sunflower near 180,000. The actuals came in at 601,000 and 157,000. The direction was right; the sunflower shortfall was worse than expected.
Now the part that is not in the table
About 100,000 tonnes of edible oil moved into India from Nepal in August, roughly 90,000 tonnes of it soyoil, and none of it is in the 1.54 million tonne figure. Official association data, due mid-September, is compiled on the same basis.
Scale it and the picture sharpens. That single month is running at more than 1.2 million tonnes annualised. Against the headline, the Nepal channel adds about 6.5%. Against the soyoil line specifically, it adds roughly 15% on top of a number already being reported as a record.
The context is a route that has been growing at a pace that is difficult to explain by consumption. Refined edible oil arriving from Nepal under the South Asian Free Trade Area framework rose from 47,295 tonnes in 2023 to 124,056 tonnes in 2024 and past 804,000 tonnes in 2025 — more than seventeenfold in two years. Nepal has limited domestic palm or soybean availability of its own, which is why the domestic refining industry has asked the government to verify rules-of-origin compliance and to review the arrangement. Industry estimates put the customs revenue foregone at Rs 2,000–2,500 crore a year.
Why the timing matters now
The tariff schedule that took effect on 1 September raised the duty payable on every notified palm and soya grade — Rs 185 a tonne more on crude palm, Rs 473 more on RBD palmolein, Rs 173 more on crude soya. Those increases apply to oil arriving through ports. They do not apply to oil arriving overland duty-free.
So the gap between the two routes just widened again, in the same week that the land route delivered its largest visible monthly contribution to date. That is not a coincidence anyone needs to allege intent about; it is simply what a persistent duty differential does to trade flows. Capital follows the cheaper entry point.
For anyone modelling Indian demand, the practical consequence is that the headline import series is now understating actual arrivals by a margin that has grown large enough to matter. A forecast built on 1.54 million tonnes and a forecast built on 1.64 million tonnes imply materially different stock positions going into October.
What it means for origin markets
Higher Indian buying of both palm and soyoil is supportive for producers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Argentina and Brazil, because it draws down origin stocks at a point in the season when they need drawing down. Dealers expect Indian imports of both oils to stay strong through September.
The caution is on the palm side specifically. India is now well covered after two heavy months, and at current ringgit levels palm is not an obvious value for a buyer with full tanks. Cargo surveyors put Malaysian August exports between 6.5% and 14.9% below July. If Indian appetite normalises in October while Malaysian output holds up, the export weakness that has dogged palm since mid-August does not resolve itself — it just changes address.
Watch three things: whether the official mid-September association data reconciles with the dealer estimates, whether the Nepal volume keeps climbing once the new duty schedule has had a full month to bite, and whether soyoil holds its discount to palm now that Chicago has rallied.
Forward-looking views here are analysis, not investment advice.
