Golden Churn cooks up a ‘sinister’ storm

Is the furore over Golden Churn butter a ploy to re-energise Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s vision for his halal hub at Tanjung Manis?

COMMENT

Could there be a more sinister reason behind “butter-gate”, the Golden Churn butter scandal? It can hardly be the question of its “halal” status, especially when neighbouring Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore did not react with mindless panic.

Is the Islamic Development Authority (Jakim) indirectly saying that Malaysian Muslims are more puritanical than their neighbours? Is Jakim claiming that its laboratory techniques are far superior?

The scarred reputation of Sarawak’s palm-oil industries has probably resulted in a dearth of investors. Is the furore over Golden Churn butter a ploy to re-energise Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s vision for his “halal hub” at Tanjung Manis?

Or is this Taib’s roundabout way of controlling the halal industry in Sarawak?

Perhaps it is all of the above. The Muslim population gearing up for Hari Raya is a captive audience. They have little choice in the matter.

It is a judicious time to whip up public sentiment against the popular Golden Churn butter so that bakeries, cooks and stockists have to switch to an alternative, perhaps a palm oil product, like margarine, conveniently manufactured in Tanjung Manis.

Or with acres of virgin jungle cleared, Taib can easily start dairy farming and produce his own butter.

Tanjung Manis has Taib’s fingerprints all over it. Teresa Toyad is related to Taib and she is also the wife of Wilson Baya Dandot, the former state secretary and CEO of the company managing Taib’s pet project, the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE).

Fatimah Abdul Rahman, is the daughter of the former chief minister and state governor Rahman Ya’kub. Taib and Rahman are now bosom buddies especially as Rahman’s other daughter, Norah, is a possible future chief minister.

As they say, “keep it all in the family”. Norah is not just the the MP for Tanjung Manis, she is also the appointed executive chariman of Tanjung Manis Industries, the state-supported conglomeration which runs the halal activities.

CM eager to promote Tanjung Manis

Taib is eager to promote Tanjung Manis as the first Halal Park in East Malaysia for upstream and downstream halal food and manufacturing activities.

In July 2010, Taib set off for the UK in a massive publicity drive to promote SCORE and Tanjung Manis. However, at the Said Business School in Oxford, Taib was humiliated in front of business heads and his Oxford hosts, by a group of demonstrators, protesting against his destruction of the environment and his treatment of the Sarawak people.

Last year, Norah who accompanied Taib to UK, was up-beat about SCORE: “We now have some serious marketing to do in UK to create awareness on the halal industry.”

This year, Taib is the world’s pariah. In the UK, he was exposed as having paid millions from the public purse to FBC, a publicity company, to paint a golden gloss on Sarawak. The Ecologist, a UK environmental magazine, published a damning report on Taib and his corruption.

In Europe, the Swiss are monitoring Taib’s business activities. Whilst in Australia, a WWF partner, the Global Forest and Trade Network announced that it was distancing itself from Taib’s forestry operations in Tasmania.

The halal industry is not fully tapped and has vast opportunities for domestic and international markets. With two billion Muslims worldwide, the global trade in halal food is estimated at around USD350 million annually.

It is not just food that can be certified halal.

Halal financial services, drugs and cosmetics also serve Muslim consumers. In 1990, the Islamic food and nutrition council of America gave halal accreditation to 23 clients. By 2006, it had around 2,000 companies worldwide.

Although the Golden Churn butter “scare” started in Johor in April, Jakim’s tests, conducted by the Chemistry Department confirmed that contamination was confined to a batch of samples taken from a coffee house in Johor. Tests by independent labs in Malaysia proved negative.

On Aug 1, the executive chairman of Ballantyne foods, Andrew Ballantyne, reassured its Muslim customers and said that each delivery of butter out of Australia and New Zealand carried mandatory quality standards from relevant government food authorities including Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service, (AQIS) and the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) in additional to strict halal certification requirements.

He added that supplies of butter to Malaysia had been certified halal by the New Zealand Islamic Processed Food Management (NZIPFM), a recognised Islamic authority in New Zealand, which was accredited by Jakim to certify products manufactured in New Zealand.

Despite Jakim’s findings, the Assistant Minister in the Chief Minister’s Department (Islamic Affairs) Daud Abdul Rahman announced on the Aug 3, that Golden Churn butter was non-halal.

This is disappointing for makers of Sarawak’s famed kek lapis which uses Golden Churn butter.

The Sarawak importer, Austar Marketing Sdn Bhd, claimed that Golden Churn butter chalked up around RM6mil sales a month for the Raya celebrations and that 80% of the butter’s purchasers were Muslim.

Someone trying to corner the market?

Is someone trying to corner the halal market and stock Sarawak shelves with its own brand? Or did the importer refuse to pay a retainer to someone in Jais, Jakim or the Sarawak CM’s department? Similar stories of such irregularities abound amongst importers of various items.

Why did Jakim flip-flop about the halal status of Golden Churn? When Jais and Jakim, religious bodies which represent the state and the nation respectively, contradict each other, mixed messages are sent to consumers.

The Ballantyne operation is not a fly-by-night farm operation with a few cows roaming around make-shift sheds, like we used to see in Malaysia. Ballantyne is an industrial set-up with thousands of cows and millions of litres of milk being sent for processing using sophisticated machinery.

Ballantyne has confirmed that it only uses high quality cream that is churned into butter. The ingredients are: cows milk, milk solids (non fat), moisture and 1.5-2 percent salt. No other additions, colours or preservatives are permitted.

How is it that only samples from the Sarawak butter were found to be non-halal? Is Jais saying that the milk solids are tainted? When would porcine milk, which in itself is difficult to obtain, get into the system? Has someone produced a copy-cat version of Golden Churn butter?

But did the spat escalate when the Ballantyne regional representative Hemmat Nasrallah slighted Daud, by speaking to the press?

Daud has avoided Hemmat and said, “We’re not out to make people’s lives difficult. We would like to see all the products as halal.”

Really?

If that wasn’t bad enough, the testing methods and standards between the different states and nations, are not uniform.

We have seen a serious deficiency in standards of Malaysian laboratories and methods of testing. Pathological specimens and examinations have been compromised: A Kugan, Teoh Beng Hock and Aminulrasyid Amzah are but a few examples. The latest Sodomy II trial is another abysmal failure of our analytical institutions.

How can we expect the ulama, the experts in food and nutrition, as well as food scientists to engage and agree on setting the standards? Perhaps, pigs will fly before they come to a concensus.

Mariam Mokhtar is a FMT columnist.