Fuziah: Govt has no plans to increase monthly subsidised cooking oil quotas

KUALA LUMPUR: There are no plans to increase the current monthly 60,000 tonnes of subsidised packet cooking oil in the market, says Fuziah Salleh.

"We are now focusing on targeted subsidies and if we are able to implement it fully, we will not need the additional 10,000 tonnes of subsidised cooking oil," the Deputy Domestic Trade and Cost of Living Minister said when replying to a question raised by Cha Kee Chin (PH-Rasah) in the Dewan Rakyat on Thursday. (Nov 2)

Cha asked if there were plans to increase the quota of packet subsidised packet cooking.

He suggested an additional 20,000 tonnes a month to meet domestic and micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) demand.

Cha said there was information that MSMEs are relying on about 30,000 metric tonnes of cooking oil a month for their businesses.

Fuziah said the government is currently working on improving the Cooking Oil Price Stabilisation Scheme System (eCOSS) tracking system to ensure that subsidised cooking oil reaches the intended beneficiaries.

At present, she said the eCOSS system only tracks subsidised cooking oil transactions involving manufacturers, repackaging companies, wholesalers and retailers.

"We want to improve on this and go beyond retailers to include data involving consumers.

"We will get the data of eligible consumers from the government’s Central Database System (Padu) by this November and put it into the eCOSS system," she added.

The eCOSS system was implemented on Jan 1 this year for the entire subsidised packet cooking oil supply chain, to record transactions such as quantity and sales price at each level from refineries, packaging companies, wholesalers and retailers.

Meanwhile, apart from improving the eCOSS system, Fuziah said there are also plans to amend the Control of Supplies Act 1961 to prevent the purchase of subsidised cooking oil by ineligible groups.