JAKARTA - Former Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Rizal Ramli criticized the performance of the Minister of Trade (Mendag) Muhammad Lutfi in overcoming the cooking oil crisis. The scarcity of cooking oil has occurred since the end of 2021, but until now it has not been controlled.
"When cooking oil was scarce, he [the Trade Minister] said it was okay, it's finished, there's no shortage, it turns out that this is already in its fourth month, showing that he doesn't understand the problem, can't work," Rizal told VOI, Thursday, March 17.
Rizal said that Indonesia as the largest palm oil exporter in the world should be able to solve the cooking oil crisis quickly. He also questioned the steps taken by the Minister of Trade so far.
"The problem is that management of abandoned can't be done, can't even manage abundant items, let alone management of rare items?" he added.
When dealing with this crisis, the Trade Minister is known to have blamed the public for panic buying amid the scarcity of cooking oil. The situation has not changed, people are still willing to wait in long lines to get cooking oil.
According to Rizal, the Trade Minister should have caught the trigger for the problem because of the scarcity of cooking oil supplies. The stock of "unseen" bulk cooking oil in the market triggered people to flock to packaged cooking oil, causing panic buying, not hoarding.
"Then it was blamed by the people, I was annoyed, when he said it was the people who hoarded. The majority of our people are daily workers, their income is not every day, they are not employees. So it's impossible to hoard cooking oil. Until yesterday I saw, there were still queues for kilometers That kind of problem can't be solved," he said.
Furthermore, the Minister of Trade carried out market operations to overcome supply and stabilize cooking oil prices. However, Rizal assessed that this effort would not reverse the situation.
"His diagnosis was wrong, he thought that market operations could help. It was a big mistake, because market operations were less than 2 percent of demand. There were a lot of people waiting in line to play, the longer it took, the more afraid the price would go up," he said.
Rizal admitted that he had handled the scarcity of staples like this when he was a state official. In handling it, the Minister of Trade should stop the large export cargo of cooking oil for domestic stock.
"The problem is not that, how is the large supply, which is exported, used for domestic use. So [the Trade Minister] doesn't understand about this. That officials and party officials like to distribute cooking oil through market operations, it's just an image," " he said.
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