EU palm-oil imports decline

EU member states imported significantly less palm oil in the 2024-’25 marketing year than the previous year.

The decrease in demand from Spain and Italy had an especially high impact on overall figures.

From July 2024 through the end of this June, the EU-27 imported around 2.8 million metric tons of palm oil, representing a decline of around 692,000 tons or 20 percent on the year before.

The Netherlands was the main recipient, although the country’s imports fell 2 percent from the previous year’s volume, reaching 959,000 tons.

It should be noted that ports such as Rotterdam or Amsterdam are central destinations for overseas imports and serve as ports of entry into the EU from where palm oil is shipped on to other EU member states.

The Netherlands is also an important European location for biofuel production, especially hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO).

Italy follows as the second largest importer with an import volume of 835,000 tons—a year-on-year decline of 28 percent.

According to investigations conducted by Agrarmarkt Informations-Gesellschaft (mbH), the decrease in palm-oil imports to Spain was even more pronounced.

The country’s imports dropped around 40 percent to 289,000 tons compared to the 2023-’24 reference period.

Germany received 227,000 tons, around 12 percent less.

Belgium and Sweden also imported substantially less palm oil from abroad, with declines amounting to 11 percent and 30 percent, respectively.

In contrast, Greece, Denmark and Ireland increased their imports.

The Union zur Förderung von Oel- und Proteinpflanzen e. V. (UFOP) said it views the decline in imports as evidence of the effectiveness of the legal exclusion of biofuels derived from palm oil.

Several EU member states, including Germany, France and the Netherlands, have already removed palm-oil based biofuels from eligibility for meeting national-quota obligations.

UFOP said it also supports the proposed exclusion of biofuels derived from palm-oil mill effluent (POME) and other residues of palm-oil production, as outlined in the current draft bill to implement the revised Renewable Energy Directive (RED III).

At the same time, the association urged customers to demand clear information regarding the waste-based feedstock used.

This call comes as biofuels policy increasingly focuses on waste oils.

In the case of palm oil-derived waste oils, such oils must still be produced.

“Fears are that if these feedstocks are not excluded from counting, shifts in feedstock sourcing will increase because with the national implementation of RED III,  shipping and aviation will be subject to greenhouse-gas (GHG) reduction obligations for the first time,” UFOP stated.

In these sectors, only waste-based alternative fuels are eligible for crediting.

Instead of relying on waste oils, the UFOP is advocating for raising the cap on biofuels from cultivated biomass to 5.9 percent—the market share in 2020 plus 1 percent—which the association noted is permissible under EU law.

The association has argued that the use of crop biomass for biofuels production serves as a supply buffer to meet feedstock demand—also for the bioethanol and biomethane sectors.

“The aim should be to meet quota requirements with actual blending volumes and make a real contribution towards climate-change mitigation in the transport sector,” UFOP stated. “This approach would also help prevent high compensation payments by mineral-oil companies subject to GHG-quota obligations, which payments could result if the option of double counting were abolished as a consequence of RED III implementation. The UFOP strongly supports the abolition of double counting, noting that it would eliminate a major cause of fraud that has been committed in the so-called advanced biofuels sector in recent years.”