Straits Times 12 Jan 08;
Good harvest and imports from China cause oversupply, leading some growers to dump produce
IPOH - JUST as Malaysia bounces back from a cooking oil shortage, it is now facing a glut of greens.
A bumper harvest due to good weather, combined with imports from China, has resulted in a sharp rise in the supply of vegetables leading to a corresponding fall in price.
The glut marks a turnaround from the short supply that Malaysia experienced just last month, when floods drove up prices of greens such as round cabbages and spinach by 40 to 50 per cent.
Then, buyers were expecting to live with the high prices in the run-up to Chinese New Year, but now farmers are being hit hard by plummeting prices of vegetables such as choy sum, spinach and kangkong.
Choy sum prices, in particular, have hit an all-time low, dropping by as much as 75 per cent in the last two weeks, and some farmers are even dumping the near-worthless greens.
Farmer K.S. Ho was on his way back from his plot in Chemor when he stumbled upon six baskets of choy sum left next to a river.
'My guess is that wholesalers were reluctant to buy them because of the low price, and farmers had no choice but to get rid of them,' he said.
Farmer Yong Ah Choon said on Wednesday that he was getting between 50 sen and 60 sen for a kilo of choy sum. 'Two weeks ago, choy sum fetched between RM1.50 (S$0.66) and RM2 a kilogramme, but today it has gone down drastically,' he said.
Another farmer, Mr Liew Yow Fatt, 48, lamented that the price of local greens had been dropping since Christmas.
'The weather here has been good and there is more supply than demand,' said the Kinta Farmers Association chairman.
The import of greens from China, he added, had resulted in vegetables flooding the market. 'Greens like spinach and kangkong are very cheap now,' he said.
But the glut is not across the board - farmers have indicated that red and green chillies and bitter gourd are still fetching high prices.
They also complained about the rising cost of fertilisers. The price of a 50kg packet of fertiliser has gone up from RM75 to RM110, with some expecting to see it hit RM120 by next month.
In Singapore, prices of vegetables such as kangkong, spinach and xiao bai cai have been dropping.
Prices of greens in Singapore had gone up earlier because of the floods in Malaysia, which usually supplies the Republic with about 300 tonnes of vegetables each day.
But the impact was softened because vegetable stocks are flowing in from local farms and other countries such as China, Thailand, Australia and Indonesia.
THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK
