In India, the production of cotton oil registered a three-fold increase from 0.46 million tonnes in 2002-03 to 1.20m tonnes in 2010-11, while in the last nine years cotton seed has become an important source of oilseeds in the country.
According to data compiled by International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Application (ISAAA) the cottonseed production in India at 310kg/bale stood at 4.21m tonnes in the year 2002-03.
It was 9.15m tonnes in the year 2009-10 and 10.07m tonnes in the year 2010-11, while production of washed cottonseed oil was 0.46m tonnes in the year 2002-03. It stood at 1.08 million tonnes in the year 2009-10 and 1.20 million tonnes in the year 2010-11. Amidst the oilseed crisis, cotton is the only oilseed crop that has shown a remarkable progress after the introduction of BT cotton hybrids in 2002, and due to the high nutritional content of cotton oil it is marketed after blending with different vegetable oils in the country.
ISAAA in its Brief 42 of Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops 2010, stated that in 2009-10 cotton oil contributed 1.08 million tonnes to India’s total production of 7.88m tonnes of edible oil from all domestic sources including cotton which is equivalent to 13.7 per cent of total edible oil production in the country. The Brief mentions that India is a major importer of edible oil in the world, and notably it imported around 8.8 million tonnes of edible oil in 2009-10 to meet the burgeoning demand for edible oil in the country. The imports of edible oil have doubled in the last five years from 4.39 million tonnes in 2003-04 to 8.8 million tonnes in 2009-10. There has been a widening gap between the production and consumption of edible oil in the country and it is estimated that the import of edible oil costs $6.5billion every year to India’s exchequer, the Brief added.
While citing Economic Times, the Brief states that the fact that imports exceeded domestic production for the first time is mainly due to the fact that, with the exception of cotton, the productivity of major oilseed crops are either stagnant or decelerating – a near stagnant oilseeds production in the last decade due to non growth in hectarage.
The All India Cottonseed Crushers’ Association (AICOSCA) estimates that cotton oil has the potential to offset a significant amount of edible oil import demand provided that effective measures are undertaken to improve cottonseed storage, implement scientific processing by delinting prior to ginning and pressing, reduce direct consumption of oil-content meal, promote decorticated meal as feed, enhance percent oil recovery, and use modern methods in processing other by-products.
An interesting observation in the report is that the retaining of cottonseed for sowing and direct consumption by farmers was found stagnant in the last 9 years at 0.50 million tonnes, and the key reason behind this is that cotton hybrid seed planting increased to 90 per cent of total cotton area cultivated. It is to be noted that cotton hybrid seeds production is undertaken separately by specialized cottonseed growers and marketed by private seed sector in the country.
