Australia is the EU’s primary rapeseed supplier in 2021/22

Although the EU rapeseed harvest was somewhat larger in 2021 than 2020, total supply in the EU-27 in the 2021/22 marketing year – estimated at 22.8 million tonnes – was around 1.2 tonnes smaller than that in the 2020/21 marketing year. The drop was due to lower beginning stocks. Demand from oil mills was initially covered by EU production. However, starting in the first half of the marketing year, the rapeseed volumes required to utilise the mills to their full capacity increasingly had to be imported from Australia, Ukraine and Canada.

According to investigations conducted by Agrarmarkt Informations-Gesellschaft (mbH), Canada’s 2021/22 shipments of 611,300 tonnes were down around 71 per cent on 2020/21 due to the smaller supply that resulted from the drop in rapeseed harvested. This means that the share of Canadian origins in total imports dropped from 32 per cent in 2020/21 to merely 11 per cent, whereas deliveries from Australia surged 45 per cent to 2.9 million tonnes. In other words, the share of Australian commodity in total imports increased 19 percentage points to 53 per cent.

Another reason for the strong increase in Australian shipments was the Russian invasion in Ukraine at the end of February. Until the war started, the European Union imported around 1.6 million tonnes of rapeseed from Ukraine each year and Ukraine’s share in EU imports amounted to just less than 50 per cent. In view of blockaded ports, however, exports from the Black Sea region stopped in the weeks that followed. As a result, Australia became more and more important as a supplier, and producer prices soared to record levels. Only small volumes of rapeseed left Ukraine also in the months that followed. In the 2021/22 marketing year, Ukrainian deliveries totalled just less than 1.7 million tonnes. This compares to 2 million tonnes a year earlier.