China increasingly turns to India for oilmeal as exports grow 900% | Today’s news
New Delhi: India has emerged as a key oilmeal supplier to China’s livestock and poultry feeds, with exports growing more than 25-fold to $157 million in 2025 as Beijing diversifies feed imports from its traditional suppliers. India shipped oilmeal worth $6.1 million in 2024.
According to World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) data reviewed by Mint, India’s oilmeal exports to China rose from $15.7 million in 2015, a nearly 900% increase over the decade, and increased China’s share of India’s global oilmeal supply to 13.5% in 2025 from 0.24% in 2025.
The shift comes as China, the world’s largest consumer of animal feed ingredients, seeks to reduce dependence on its traditional suppliers such as the US, Brazil and Argentina amid periodic supply cuts, weather-related production risks and fluctuations in global agricultural commodity prices. China has been a marginal market for India’s oilmeal exports for most of the past decade, accounting for less than 2% of shipments in most years.
Oil meal is a protein-rich by-product left over from the extraction of oil from oilseeds such as soybean, mustard and groundnut, and is also used as an organic fertilizer.
Price factor
The key factor here is price. “The sharp increase in India’s oilmeal exports to China was largely driven by competitive canola meal prices in India and Chinese restrictions on Canadian canola imports,” said BV Mehta, executive director of the Solvent Extractors Association of India (SEA), an industry body representing the vegetable oils and oilseeds sector. “This has created a significant opportunity for Indian exporters to fill the supply gap in the Chinese feed market.”
Ajay Srivastava, founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative, said the rise in Indian costs was due to China’s growing demand for protein-rich feed ingredients used in the livestock and aquaculture sectors. “The country is expanding its feed supply to support its poultry, pork and fishing industries, while diversifying its sources of supply,” he said.
“India has emerged as a beneficiary of this strategy due to the competitive prices of oilmeal, especially rapeseed and soybean,” Srivastava said. “Lower export availability from some major producing countries and fluctuations in international feed prices have further increased the attractiveness of Indian supplies.”
The increase in exports to China is significant because it occurred despite a decline in overall oilmeal exports from India. India’s global shipments fell to $1.16 billion in 2025 from $1.48 billion in 2024.
Email queries to the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Animal Husbandry and Dairying and the Ministry of Commerce as well as the Chinese Embassy in Delhi remained unanswered till press time.
Thawing ties
Experts see the rise in oilmeal exports as a sign that economic ties between India and China are slowly strengthening in select sectors, despite lingering geopolitical sensitivities.
“The increase in oilmeal trade is significant because it comes at a time when both India and China are cautiously rebuilding economic channels that have weakened in recent years,” said Amit Singh, associate professor at the Special Center for National Security Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Agricultural commodities often become the first areas where trade engagement revives as they are driven by immediate market needs rather than strategic considerations.”
India’s total exports to China rose to $18 billion in 2025 from $15.1 billion the previous year, while imports rose to $124.8 billion from $109.3 billion during the period, Commerce Ministry data shows. India’s trade deficit with China has thus widened to $106.8 billion in 2025 from $94.2 billion in 2024.
