Abstract
Palm oil prices in 2019 continued their slow slide that began two years earlier. Against a general backdrop of slowing growth in emerging countries, primarily China, and trade frictions between the European Union and Indonesia, the palm oil market is for the second consecutive year in a situation of marked surplus. Over the past five years, production has grown on average at twice the rate of imports. With a record year for rapeseed, India, the largest importing country, has just stabilized its imports at the level of the previous year. The same was true of the European Union, the second importing region, where the prospect is confirmed of an exclusion of palm oil from vegetable oils subject to the advantageous tax provisions applied to agrofuels as of 2023. In response to critics of European civil society, the major producing countries, Indonesia in particular, are trying to assert the 'sustainable' nature of their production, through the development of certifications. Indonesia has also decided on a moratorium on the cultivation of new palm groves. The fact remains that the extension of these over the past ten years has an inevitable inertia: the peak of production occurs on average six years after planting, which augurs for a continuous increase in Indonesian production at least until 2024. Palm oil resumed at the end of 2019, with a rebound in Chinese imports ahead of the New Year celebrations—referring to a world before the spread of the coronavirus. It closed 2019 at $763/t CIF Europe, limiting the decline from one year to the next to 6%. It remains the cheapest vegetable oil traded in the world, its price averaging 20% below that of its direct competitors, rapeseed, sunflower and soybean oils.