Cooking oil shortage to be addressed urgently

KOTA KINABALU, August 17, 2011: Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP) has questioned the reason for shortage of cooking oil in the market in Sabah, which will be critical with Hari Raya Aidil Fitri coming.

Information Chief, Chong Pit Fah said empty shelves could be seen at supermarkets here and if the situation is not addressed soon, it would create difficulties to Muslims in Sabah during the Hari Raya festivity.

"The cooking oil still left on the shelves are those expensive ones while the palm oil-based cooking oil, which is supposed to be cheaper is out of stock," he said, adding that it was illogical for such situation to happen since Sabah is the country's biggest oil palm producer.

"This is another failure of the Barisan government. Sabah has no downstream industry for oil palm. If we have cooking oil processing factories we will not be facing this situation right now," he said.

Chong said that there is also other downstream industry such as getting the oil palm residues to be used as the base for making soap but not available in Sabah.

"Why is this happening? We should not be facing the problem as we are the biggest oil palm producer in the country and yet we do," he said.

He said the people were being forced to buy more expensive cooking oil, which they have to use more than usual in view of the fasting month and coming Hari Raya.

SAPP urged the relevant authorities to monitor and ensure that there would be sufficient cooking oil supply in the market, particularly for the Hari Raya AIdil Fitri.