India's Sept palm oil imports ease, soyoil falls 4.4 pct - trade body

MUMBAI, Oct 16 (Reuters) - India's palm oil imports dropped 1.4 percent to 918,675 tonnes in September from a year earlier as higher duties and a depreciating rupee made imports more expensive, a leading trade body said on Tuesday.

Soyoil imports dropped 4.4 percent to 341,402 tonnes in September, while sunflower oil imports dropped nearly a quarter from a year ago to 149,930 tonnes, the Solvent Extractors' Association of India (SEA) said in a statement.

India is the world's biggest importer of edible oils. Its total vegetable oil imports eased 2 percent to 1.42 million tonnes in September, it added.

In the first 11 months of the 2017/18 marketing year ending October, India has imported 7.95 million tonnes of palm oil, down 7 percent from a year ago, the SEA said.

India buys palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia, with its soyoil mainly imported from Argentina and Brazil, and purchases sunflower oil from Ukraine.

The country's palm oil imports in 2018/19 are likely to jump 8.7 percent from a year earlier as consumption in the world's biggest edible oil consumer will expand amid a drop in local supplies, a leading industry analyst said last month. (Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)