Lazy locals and greedy aliens

Our writer investigates one cause of rising food prices in the Klang Valley.

P K See, 72, runs a foodstall inside a high-rise building in Kuala Lumpur. In a survey done in 2011, the popular blog TimeoutKL.com found that hers was one of the top joints in the city for its “mixed rice”.

But it was around that time that she noticed her daily profits sliding. She knew that the reason was the rising prices of vegetables. She blamed the rains for that and prayed that the weather would get better.

The rains did stop, but vegetable prices kept going up.

“The good times are gone forever,” she said in a recent interview.

See buys her vegetables from vendors at the Pudu wet market, who get their supplies from the Kuala Lumpur Wholesale Market in Selayang, known to locals as “pasar borong”.

See told me she was aware of a rumour that foreign nationals had taken control of the vegetable trade at pasar borong and had formed a price-fixing cartel.

I decided to check out the rumour myself and made a trip one morning to Selayang. The market opens at 3am, but I thought it would be wise to go there around 10am, by which time most of the hustle and bustle would have been over and the stall operators would have the time to chat.

I spoke to vendors who were obviously Malaysian and who were obviously in the minority. According to them, about 90% of the vegetable section is controlled by immigrants from Myanmar who pay rent to the licensed Malaysian stall owners.

The pasar borong has 448 stalls and supplies three-quarters of the Klang Valley’s hypermarkets, wet markets, night markets and grocery shops. If it is true that a cartel controls vegetable prices there, then they must have an enormous influence on the cost of living in Kuala Lumpur and surrounding areas.

Price fixing
According to some allegations, most of the foreigners pay the going rental rate of RM4,000 a month for each stall, but the shrewder licensed owners are able to rent their stalls for two shifts over a 24-hour period. That means these owners are making a cool RM8,000 a month without selling anything.

“In the beginning,” a Malaysian butcher told me, “these foreigners were salaried workers. Some were caught stealing money, but some were stealing the produce to sell them at night markets. But there was a lack of enforcement, and things continued that way for a while.

“But they have become smarter. They can now conduct the businesses themselves, paying out large sums of money for bulk supplies and distributing them to retailers.”

Is it legal for a licensee to rent out his stall to another person? But the more pertinent question is this: Can’t the authorities do anything about price fixing?

Shouldn’t the government take some action to reduce the hardship experienced by a large portion of Malaysian households?

In November 2010, a news report quoted Kuala Lumpur City Hall officials as saying they would study problems at the pasar borong in Selayang. A mainstream newspaper said Deputy Federal Territories and Wellbeing Minister M Saravanan would look into the many problems related to foreign workers and cleanliness.

It has been more than two years since.

A top ministry official recently said the problems had remained unresolved because the geographical location of the market required cooperation between City Hall and the Selayang Municipal Council, which is under Pakatan Rakyat’s Selangor government.

Was he in fact saying that ordinary Malaysians are paying the price of animosity between political parties?