Palm Set for Best Year Since 2011 With La Nina in Spotlight
Bloomberg 1/15/2021 Anuradha Raghu and Eko Listiyorini
(Bloomberg) Palm oil prices are set to have their best annual showing in a decade even as the coronavirus pandemic rages on.
Benchmark futures for the tropical oil, used in everything from cooking oil to shampoo, will average 3,200 ringgit ($791) a ton in 2021, the highest in a decade, according to the median of 23 estimates in a Bloomberg survey of analysts, traders and plantation executives, versus 2,700 ringgit last year.
A bullish cocktail of La Nina-linked flooding and shrinking inventories in Malaysia is bolstering the market, but prices may come under pressure in the second half as production of palm, as well as soybean oil, rebounds. Food and fuel demand is shrouded in uncertainty as the virus persists in key markets.
CRUDE palm oil (CPO) prices have been rising this year to attain an eight-year high despite the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting brighter prospects for the plantation sector.
The most active CPO futures contract closed at RM3,437 last Friday. It had climbed to RM3,489 on Nov 19 after falling to a year-low of RM1,946 in May. Since then, prices have risen higher.
Spot prices breached the RM3,500 benchmark on Nov 19, rebounding from the low of RM2,030.50 on May 14, 2020.
MIDF Research Analyst Khoo Zhen Ye says the current rally in CPO prices has been premised on lower supply, as palm oil inventory levels have been declining despite now being the higher production period. A decline in soybean production in South America and in sunflower oil in the Black Sea also contributed to higher CPO prices.