PUTRAJAYA must stop blaming fishermen and farmers for the price hikes of poultry products, Consumers Association of Subang and Shah Alam president Jacob George said. 

“These people have gone through a lot. They have had to face a shortage of manpower, land threats, costs of antibiotics, and so forth,” he said during a talk on food security hosted by Tehmina Kaoosji on SinarDaily TV. 

Economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram and agriculture policy analyst Fatimah Arshad were also present as panelists. 

George said politicians have villainised the producers by calling them “cartels” and blaming them for the surge in prices, which is not true.

Malaysia’s heavy reliance on food imports has contributed to the rise in the cost of living today. Supply chain disruptions due to the Ukraine war and ringgit depreciation are among the reasons for soaring prices of food, especially poultry.

Although Malaysia imports 60% of its food products, the country is considered self-sufficient in poultry meat, producing 98.2% of its domestic needs.

However, the poultry farming business greatly depends on imported chicken feed from Brazil and Argentina. 

“Yes, we had cartels in the past, but today we have to understand that this is a global phenomenon,” he said. 

He said instead of playing the blame game, the government should find a way to relieve the burden on the producers by setting the right price for both the supplier and the consumer.

“What we are doing is we are killing the very people who are securing food on our table and that mentality and that noise is coming from the top 20% and it must stop. We should have some respect,” he said. 

“We need to have a very honest conversation and sit down with those pushing to increase prices and ask them to justify why the prices should increase,” adding that there should be negotiations between the government and those involved. 

Jomo agreed Putrajaya is playing the blame game. 

“I have been studying this issue for a long time, the middlemen issue was important, certainly in the past, but today, in this day and age we find that at the marketing level, it is reasonably competitive,” he said. 

“In fact, the monopolies and monopsony have been created by government,” he said. 

Jomo said many vegetable farmers have been affected by state-sanctioned clearing of their land.

“This is of course worrying, considering that we already have a shortage of fruits and vegetables so this is going to set things back even further,” he said. 

“So, there are a lot of ‘own goals’ by the government, if you want to use a football analogy, which is making things worse,” he added. 

Meanwhile, Fatimah said the government’s paper policies on agriculture in the past few years have been “A++ ” yet it has still failed to deliver the solution to the country’s food security crisis. 

Lack of structural change, farmers who have little to zero knowledge of the new farming methods, and lack of capacity building to produce for the country are among the reasons Malaysia still face the decades-old problem. 

She said compared to countries like Vietnam, which is now a major exporter of rice, shrimp, and coffee, despite having gone through a war that lasted 20 years. 

“I can see big research deficits here, we don’t produce high yielding variety, we don’t produce our own machines, we don’t have automation on our farmers and we rely heavily on imported labourers,” she said. 

Malaysia is becoming more reliant on imported food and has a food trade deficit, according to the Statistics Department.

In 2015, the import dependency ratio increased to 13.7%, up from 7.4% in 1987.

The most imported items are mangoes – 86.2% of the fruit consumed in Malaysia  are imported – followed by round cabbage (63.6%), cuttlefish (52.5%), mutton (90.4%), beef (78.1%), and fresh milk (78.1%).

These items made up 53.5% of food imports in 2020. – May 27, 2022.