Mount Abu, Rajasthan: India meets only 44% of its domestic demand for edible oil and spends more than $20 billion a year on imports, a bill that is bound to increase with the war in West Asia disrupting global supply chains and India’s foreign currency reserves under strain.

Already, IndiaSpend’s Food Price Watch has recorded significant year-on-year price increases across different edible oils. Based on the prices of packed oil on May 30, 2026, groundnut oil was up 7% from 2025, mustard oil 12%, palm oil 9%, soya oil 9%, sunflower oil 15% and vanaspati 4%.

Two years ago, the government launched a mission to increase oilseeds production by nearly 80% by the end of this decade, but that assumes a jump in productivity that needs urgent support in the form of farmer outreach, seeds resistant to climatic changes and pests, and an overhaul of the procurement and value addition chains, experts say.

Under the National Mission on Edible Oils, the government has rolled out minimum support prices (MSP) for the procurement of oilseeds, and tariffs to discourage imports and encourage domestic production of edible oils. This includes rapeseed-mustard, groundnut, soybean, sunflower, sesamum, safflower, niger, linseed and palm. While the latter two aren’t covered by the MSP programme, fresh fruit bunches of palm are covered by a baseline price.

To cater to the growing demand for oilseeds, this programme now targets increasing the oilseed area coverage from 29 million hectares (ha) in 2022-23 to 33 million hectares by 2030-31, and the primary oilseed production from 39 million tonnes to 69.7 million tonnes in the same period.

Targeting a 79% increase in production from a 14% increase in acreage presumes a huge jump in productivity, which is up against “a combination of agro-climatic, technological and socio-economic factors, asides genetic limitations”, Ravi Mathur, director of the ICAR-Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research, told IndiaSpend.

“With farmers tending to allocate better land, irrigation, and inputs to cereals and cash crops, oilseeds are often cultivated in residual moisture conditions, on relatively poor soils and in less-favoured production regions,” he said.

In the last three decades, oilseeds acreage across India has increased by more than half, but north and south India saw a drop of 54% and 37%, respectively, offset by a tripling of area under oilseeds in central India and roughly doubling in both west and northeast India.

Low household consumption

India’s per capita consumption of edible oil is widely stated as 19.7 kg per year. However, this consumption spans domestic and industrial uses of oilseeds.

The 2022-23 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey shows that in rural India, the per capita consumption of edible oils is 10.58 kg per year, and in urban India, it is 11.78 kg per year. These figures also include non-food uses in homes such as for lighting diyas, Dattatraya Mahabaleshwar Hegde, former director of the ICAR-Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research, pointed out.

In 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi thrice asked his fellow citizens to cut down on their consumption of edible oil for health reasons, in January, February and August. He pointed to rising obesity to suggest that a 10% cut in edible oil consumption can “bring a big change in your health”.

Last month, the Prime Minister repeated his appeal, as part of a list of measures including asking citizens to help conserve foreign exchange reserves by cutting down on purchasing gold and spending on foreign travel, and a shift to public transport, in the face of oil shortages.

The Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Nutrition has recommended restricting........

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