Vegetable Oil and Fat Industry

the sector of the food-processing industry that encompasses the production of vegetable oils, the hydrogenation and separation of fats, and the production of margarine, mayonnaise, glycerol, fat-based laundry soaps and detergents, and drying oils.

There were about 10,000 small vegetable oil and fat production shops and about 400 licensed, poorly equipped oil and fat plants in tsarist Russia. The vegetable oil output in 1913 was 538,000 tons; in addition, the equivalent of 192,000 tons of soap was produced (figured at a 40-percent fatty-acid content).

Under Soviet power, the vegetable oil and fat industry has become one of the major sectors of the food-processing industry, relying on advanced technology and a stable raw materials base. There are enterprises of the vegetable oil and fat industry in all of the Union republics. The largest are combines in Krasnodar, Moscow, Tashkent, Dushanbe, Irkutsk, Saratov, Kirovabad, Sverdlovsk, Gomel’, and Kazan, which account for 45 percent of the USSR’s total output of vegetable oil, about 65 percent of its margarine, and more than 75 percent of its soap and detergents.

In 1972 the vegetable oil and fat industry accounted for 5.4 percent of the gross output of the food-processing industry of the USSR, 2.5 percent of the work force, and 2.7 percent of the fixed industrial production assets.

The USSR is the world’s second largest producer of vegetable oils, soap, and margarine (after the USA). It accounts for more than 14 percent of the world’s vegetable oil. The output of vegetable oil in the USSR is growing steadily; production in 1972 was 3.6 times that of 1940 (see Table 1).

Owing to the increase in agricultural production, state purchases of oil-yielding crops in 1972 were twice the 1940 figure. The oil content of sunflower seeds, which account for 50 percent of all seeds processed by industry, has risen significantly. The material and technical basis for the vegetable oil and fat industry has grown. Production capacities for processing oil-yielding seeds have been increased primarily by modernizing existing extraction plants and building new ones. Introduction of the extraction method of processing oil-yielding seeds has made it possible to increase labor productivity, mechanize and automate production processes, and sharply increase the oil output from raw materials (see Table 2).

The proportion of oil-yielding raw materials processed by progressive extraction methods increased from 9.9 percent in 1940 to 81 percent in 1972.

Production in the margarine and soap industries is fully mechanized.

In the other socialist countries the vegetable oil and fat industry is based primarily on local raw materials. The volume of production has generally satisfied the needs of these countries. In 1972 the vegetable oil output in Rumania was 360,000 tons; in Poland, 213,000 tons; in Yugoslavia, 165,000 tons; in Bulgaria, 145,000 tons; in the German Democratic Republic, 131,-000 tons; in Czechoslovakia, 88,000 tons; and in Hungary, 80,000 tons.

The production of vegetable oil in certain capitalist countries was as follows: 830,000 tons in Italy (1972), 801,000 tons in the Federal Republic of Germany (1971), and 520,000 tons in France (1971). In the USA vegetable oil production in 1972 came to 4.6 million tons; the output of margarine was 2.6 million tons, and that of soap and synthetic detergents was 3.5 million tons.