German rapeseed imports up despite large harvest

In the crop year 2022-’23, Germany imported around 5.74 million metric tons of rapeseed.

This was 2 percent more than in the previous marketing season, although the 2022 rapeseed harvest was more abundant than a year earlier.

Australia remained the No. 1 supplier country, delivering 1.4 million tons.

A year earlier, Germany had received around 12,000 tons more.

At 3.4 million tons, the majority of imports came from EU countries, according to investigations conducted by Agrarmarkt Informations-Gesellschaft (mbH).

This figure, however, is misleading because, according to official statistics, Belgium delivered about 323,000 tons to German oil mills and traders despite a national harvest of only 32,000 tons.

As in previous years, the largest share of these shipments was probably Ukrainian commodity since Ghent is a delivery location for contract commodity at the Paris stock exchange.

From there, the deliveries are directly transported on to the Rhine River.

Unlike in previous marketing years, imports from the Netherlands did not play any significant role in 2022-’23.

France supplied around 1.1 million tons of rapeseed to Germany, which was up around 388,000 tons on the previous year. This tonnage was probably actually produced in France.

In the case of rapeseed imported from Poland, the Baltic countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the origins are not always evident from the foreign trade figures.

Poland had a large rapeseed harvest in 2022, but this is likely not the reason why the country’s shipments to Germany rose 230,000 tons to just less than 540,000 tons. Instead, most of this was probably rapeseed from Ukraine.

The same applies to the Baltic rim.

For example, Sweden delivered five times the amount in 2022-’23 and Denmark 1.5 times the amount.

Larger volumes also came from the EU’s eastern border, more specifically Slovakia. The country’s deliveries to Germany more than doubled.

About 705,000 tons came from Ukraine itself, which translates to an increase of about 90,000 tons.

As a consequence of the brisk import activities for rapeseed from Ukraine, analogue effects on import volumes are expected to occur in the 2023-’24 marketing year, especially because the German 2023 rapeseed harvest was smaller than in the previous year.