THE short supply of base ingredients from China and Taiwan is pushing up the prices of Chinese herbal medicines in the country, drug dealers said.

They said the average price increase is 10-20%.

Chinese Drug Dealers Association in the Federal Territory and Selangor president Loh Kim Fong said the shortage is due to a spike in demand for base ingredients in the two main producing countries – China and Taiwan.

He, however, allayed fears, saying the price fluctuation in Chinese medicines is nothing new and the cost will definitely go down once supply is back to normal.

He told The Malaysian Insight that the shortage of the much-used ingredients, such as winter wormwood and wild mountain bubble ginseng, is the root cause of the current high price of Chinese medicines.

Loh said another reason is the sluggish market condition.

“Currently, the demand for traditional medicine is not so good. Business is very slow. Chinese medicine shops have stopped buying the ingredients,” he said.

“People are no longer fearful of Covid-19 as they once were, despite reports of the emergence of a new variant.

“They no longer come running to our shops. Everyone is treating Covid-19 as the common flu with no necessity to take medicine.”

He said people are treating the symptoms by drinking a lot of water, taking over-the-counter vitamin supplements and boiling old ginseng to drink.

“Previously, they were buying everything off the shop, especially lung-clearing and detoxifying soups,” he said.

Malaysian Chinese Medical Association president Heng Aik Teng concurred with Loh’s assessment. He said there is a spike in demand in China and Taiwan for traditional medicine, leading to a rerouting of supply to meet local consumption.

“The number of people in China and Taiwan taking adult medicine is on the rise,” said Heng.

He said in Taiwan, the increase in demand is two to threefold.

That, he said, is a “huge consumption” and the reason why the export volume has decreased.

He said the short supply, experienced by countries like Malaysia, has led some herbalists to resort to hoarding.

Heng said a Taiwanese herbal exporter had informed him that traditional medicine was so much in demand in his country that when a new adult medicine was out in the morning, it would be sold off in six hours. – May 11, 2023.