Moscow, April 16 - Russia plans to raise from June 1 a 5 percent import tariff on tropical oils, as their usage as substitutes for dairy products damages the domestic dairy industry, Agriculture Ministry Yelena Skrynnik said on Thursday.
"We will have to do it from June 1," Skrynnik told reporters, when asked if the government planned to change the tariff. But she said the actual rate of the new tariff had yet to be calculated.
The Russian Dairy Union, the industry's lobbying group, in a letter to President Dmitry Medvedev published on its website www.dairyunion.ru [http://www.dairyunion.ru] said imports of tropical oils nearly doubled in the last five years to over 900,000 tonnes in 2008.
A tariff of 5 percent is currently applied to palm, palm kernel and coconut oil in canisters and other containers larger than 200 kg.
Russia suspended for the first time the tariff on unpackaged tropical oils for nine months from September 2007 as part of a process to remove import duties on commodities which Russia does not produce, or produces in insufficient quantity.
Later it extended the zero tariff to March 2009.
Unpackaged palm oil constitutes the bulk of these commodities imports to Russia.
Russia imported 236,000 tonnes of palm oil from the start of the 2008/09 marketing year in October to the end of March 2009, 150,000 less than a year ago, Andrei Sizov Jr., executive director of SovEcon agricultural analysts, told Reuters.
He said the decline resulted from a rise in domestic output of sunseed oil, which in some cases may substitute palm oil.