Cooking oil price causes trouble manifold.
Raising snack price and squeezing the household.
Old style steaming-baking could offer answer,
Saving currency earned by sweat-shop worker.
1.
Nothing matches the joy of breaking a smoking hot singara into two and taking a little bite from one half after adding tamarind/tomato sauce on it.
The winter afternoon offers delightful sight of deep fried snacks on roadside. No matter where you live, if you take a stroll along the local allay you will notice roadside eateries and mobile snack sellers showcase multitude of snacks like singara, puri , samosa fried in palm oil. These items are on the menu throughout the year. People from all walks of life relish them.
When it comes to pay the price for the golden-brown desi snacks, they cost a bit more than what they cost few years ago. Wheat, cooking oil cost a lot nowadays. Despite the falling income of household , prices for the snacks show no sign to come down to their previous level.
2.
Prices of key kitchen commodities remain higher than their regular level. Coarse rice is still being sold at between Tk 45 and Tk 48 per kilo. Onion price drops as harvested onion reaches wholesale market. No change in prices of other essential commodities that matter a lot to middle and lower income groups.
It is the cooking oil price that is causing the most trouble.According to a news report, bottled soybean oil costs Tk 134 per liter. Meanwhile, a 5-liter bottle costs Tk 655. Soaring price is attributed to China's aggressive import from Argentina, world's largest soybean oil producer.
Apart from soybean oil we also import palm oil. Rising price of soybean oil will also influence the price of palm oil, which is increasingly being used to cook the delicious roadside snacks.
In the good old British colonial days, our cooking oil industry was self reliant. Veteran journalist Abdul Gaffar Chowdhury recounted the glory days of Mustard oil in his memoir.Mustard oil, ghee(purified butter) were mostly used in cooking. Mustard was produced in abundance across the subcontinent and rural household possessed cows, goats, water buffaloes. So milk based products like ghee were available for mass consumption. Pakistani period put an end to the mustard oil and ghee industry as ghani(the place where mustard oil was processed) owners and milkmaid (mostly Hindu ) left the country. In addition, cheap dalda(cooking oil made up from animal fat) from Pakistan flooded the market. As the Bengali household took up the habit of cooking in dalda oil, dalda gradually curved out a market in East Pakistan. And the empty bottles of mustard oil and ghee gradually disappeared in the back of the racks of meat shelf.
After independence, dalda dominated the market and soybean oil gradually made entry into kitchen market. Early ninety witnessed the boom of palm oil. Now dalda lost its place to palm oil.
Now our cooking oil need is mostly met by imported oil. According to a news report, domestic cooking oil demand is around 1.5 million tons. Our oilseed (mustard, sunflower, peanut, soya)production is still low. It is gradually increasing however. In 2014-15, we produced 901,000 metric tons of oilseeds. In 2017-18, oilseed production reached 1026,000 metric tons(Source: Bangladesh Economic Review 2019). There is always a demand supply gap. In 2014-2015, we imported $924 million worth of cooking oil. In 2017-18, the amount rose to $1863 million (source: BER 2019). Despite the unfavorable tariff structure, the stat shows how cooking oil hungry nation we have become. No wonder the cooking oil or the edible oil industry generates lucrative profit. The business groups involved in this industry expanded their businesses in other sectors.
However the industry did not manage to get rid of reliance on import. Oilseed cultivation land has increased over the years. But land scarcity and weather conditions make widespread cultivation of oilseeds untenable.
Meanwhile government can look forward to other countries where soybean, mustard and palm cultivation atmosphere prevail. Bangladesh could easily cut some sort of agreement with Myanmar, USA or other countries where commercial cultivation of soya and palm would be possible at an affordable cost. Semi processed or the whole produce could then be imported into the country and processed for domestic consumption. At least this kind of initiative will widen our sources of import and curb the dependence on one single source.
At the same time, it is not pragmatic to keep just few operators in the industry by imposing some protective duties. Government should abolish all kinds of entry barriers in a bid to allow new investment and initiative in this industry. Too many operators increase the possibility of better products at affordable price while nurturing a competitive atmosphere, which the oligopolistic industry badly needs right now for the sake of consumers. Similarly, government should welcome any foreign investment in this industry.
3.
Another traditional snack is also garnering lot of attention in this winter. It is the steam-cooked rice cake. "Bhapa pitha" (steamed cake),as it is popularly known in this part of the world, is available in two varieties:sweet--- molasses and coconut stuffed pitha---and non-sweet---no stuffed thing. Not a drop of oil is added in cooking this pitha. Traditional Bengali cuisine has many dishes where no oil is used. It means we have habits of eating oil free food. In many societies in the world where firewood is scarce, steaming and baking are pretty common practice in preparation of food. I am amazed watching how they cook food employing ingenious means to amplify heat. I find it hilarious that we ended up paying $1.8 billion in 2017-18 to import cooking oil. The figure does not include import of oilseeds. If it were included, then import of cooking oil related products would reach more than $2 billion. This currency was earned by our workers who took up jobs refused by others in foreign countries and spending gruelling hours at sweat-shop factories at home. We could save this money by switching and reviving back that heat-and- oil-saving part of our cooking tradition. Choice is ours.
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