Consumers continue to feel the pinch of rising cooking oil prices, with manufacturers attributing it to soaring soy beans prices, high cost of transport and rising global prices of raw materials.
In the month,the price of cooking oil has increased by an average of 12 percent, leaving consumers grappling further with the cost of living crisis.
Business News spot checks show that in the past month, prices of various brands of cooking oil have increased with Kukoma and Purola fetching K99 000 per 20 litres from K88 000 while Mulawe has increased from K87 000 to K98 500 per 20 litres.
Blantyre-based Chisomo James who resides in Zingwangwa Township, said yesterday she bought a two-litre bottle of Kukoma at K10 300 last week from K8 500 at the end of September this year.
Yesterday, a two-litre bottle of Kukoma was selling at K10 500 in Sana Megastore in Blantyre while that of Sunfoil was fetching K11 995.
In its Market Intelligence Report for September 2024, the Reserve Bank of Malawi observed that global crude vegetable oil prices such as palm oil and soy bean oil increased in the third quarter of this year.
Reads the report in part: “The price of palm oil grew by 5.4 percent to $983 [about K1.7 million] per metric tonne [MT] from $933 [about K1.6 million] per metric tonne in the preceding month.
“This was influenced by concerns over low production and anticipated seasonal declines in output from major Southeast Asian producing countries.”
Export Trading Group (ETG), which produces Purola cooking oil in a collaborative venture with Agriculture Value Chain, attributed the price increases to soaring soy beans prices, high cost of transport and rising global prices of raw materials.
ETG country manager Rajneesh Dabral in an interview yesterday, said: “We are trying to make the price affordable. Otherwise the cost of raw materials and the cost of production have gone up significantly.”
In a separate interview, an industry insider working within the cooking oil production value chain who did not want to be named said soy bean prices have almost doubled from K800 to K1 500 per kilogramme, pushing cooking oil prices up.
“Soy bean is the critical raw material in cooking oil production and with soy price skyrocketing, we should expect other products that use the crop as raw materials to increase as well,” he said.
Consumers Association of Malawi executive director John Kapito, in an interview yesterday, warned that consumers should anticipate such price increases going forward.
“The reasons are that the kwacha is weakening on a monthly basis and that there is low supply of raw materials,” he said.
Competition and Fair Trading Commission spokesperson Innocent Helema was not immediately available for comment, but in July this year he said the commission started a price monitoring exercise to ascertain allegations of price fixing of cooking oil.
In 2021, CFTC launched an investigation against cooking oil manufacturers for increasing their products by between 30 percent and 42 percent and colluding in price increases.
