Romania Seen Leading World Sunflower-Seed Exports on Bigger Crop

By Bloomberg - Rudy Ruitenberg

Romania will be the world’s largest exporter of sunflower seed in the current 2013-14 season on the back of a bigger harvest and a lack of tariffs or quotas on deliveries, Oil World said.

Shipments of the oilseed from Romania may jump to 1.05 million metric tons in the year through next July from 767,000 tons in the previous period, the Hamburg-based industry researcher wrote in an e-mailed report today.

Farmers in the nation harvested an estimated 1.95 million tons of sunflower seed this year, from 1.4 million tons in 2012, according to Oil World. Limited growth of domestic processing capacity may prompt Romania to ship its surplus to other countries, the report showed. 

“The absence of any regulatory measures on sunseed exports is seen providing Romanian exporters with a competitive advantage compared to their colleagues in Ukraine and Russia,” Oil World wrote.

Deliveries outside the European Union will triple to 500,000 tons from 167,000 tons in 2012-13, according to the report. Romania already shipped 186,000 tons of sunflower seed to Pakistan in the August-October period, after delivering no cargoes in the year-earlier period, the researcher wrote.