Mercadona and Eroski restrict the sale of sunflower oil due to the war

The shopping basket is not going through its best moment with the first restrictions on the acquisition of basic necessities. Supermarkets begin to restrict the sale of oil to avoid possible problems of shortages due to the war in Ukraine.

Mercadona has imposed a limit of five liters per customer, while the Velgasa-Eroski food chain limits the sale of sunflower oil to five bottles in the Familia and Eroski supermarkets and two boxes in Cash Record. Both chains began to apply these measures on Saturday, March 5.

In recent days, supermarket chains have begun to appreciate that customers are beginning to collect bottles, so they have decided to limit purchases, thus avoiding an effect like the one that occurred with toilet paper at the beginning of the season from spreading. covid pandemic.

Although the companies do not have a close commercial relationship with Ukraine and Russia, in the case of sunflower oil, some companies import 60% of the seeds used for its manufacture from the conflict zone.

The impossibility of importing raw material may make it necessary to seek alternatives to the standardized use of sunflower oil in products and to resort to alternatives such as rapeseed or palm oil.

Europe’s breadbasket

The increase in inflation and the conflict in Ukraine, the granary of Europe, where 70% of the territory is arable, and it is the world’s largest producer of sunflower oil, according to 2019 data compiled by the Observatory of the Economic Complexity (OEC), are causing an increase in the prices of agricultural raw materials.

Sunflower oil, specifically, rises more than 13% in the year, and the price increase since June of last year, when the lowest prices of 2021 were seen, is close to 50%. Corn, for its part, has risen 28% so far this year in the US market, the largest in the world, and is already trading at less than 10% of the all-time highs reached in 2012.

As for wheat, the durum wheat variety is the one that is experiencing the most pronounced rises to date, of almost 75% since last July.