Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Indonesia's ban of palm oil exports is a big deal

Indonesia, a country you don't often read about in the news, has inserted itself into the international news cycle by banning exports of all palm oil, almost overnight.

That might not seem like the most pressing of news items, but it represents just one more nail in the coffin of the beleaguered supply chain and the globalist multinational world order in general. Indonesian palm oil is a big deal in global terms: it makes up some 60% of worldwide vegetable oil shipments, and it is ubiquitous in food preparation and other spheres of daily life, from baked good to fried food to cosmetics to cleaning products. Indonesia supplies 56% of the world's palm oil (Malaysia is in second place with just 31%). Africa and Asia in particular are heavily reliant on Indonesian palm oil; Pakistan and Bangladesh import about 80% of their palm oil from Indonesia, and India over half.

And this comes at a particularly bad time. Food oils of all kinds are under pressure worldwide for a variety of different reasons: soya oil due to droughts in South America, canola (rapeseed) oil due to bad weather and disastrous harvests in Canada, sunflower oil due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Malaysian palm oil due to labour shortages in Malaysia. Vegetable oil prices have already increased by more than 50% over the last six months, and this move by Indonesia is only going to make that much worse.

And the reason? Well, all we are being told is that it is "a move to tackle rising domestic prices". I'm not entirely sure how increasing prices for everyone else is going to materially help Indonesia's own inflation problem, coming as it is from all sorts of different areas, not least oil and gas.

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