GEORGE TOWN: The Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) is concerned over food waste increase of between 15 and 20 per cent during Ramadan.
CAP president Mohideen Abdul Kader said most of the food waste ends up in the landfill.
He said as much as 20,088 tonnes of food went into the garbage bin nationwide daily during Ramadan in 2018.
"With that quantity wasted daily during the entire month of Ramadan, there is enough to feed one and a half times the Malaysian population.
"This year, the estimated food and plastic materials discarded daily during the holy month would be about 10,000 tonnes," he said today.
Food wastage, Mohideen said, could lead to higher food prices as it would increase demand in relation to supply.
"Moreover, we are highly dependent on food imports which are usually transacted in US dollars. With the current exchange rate, we have to pay more for the same quantity. For Malaysia, it is the outflow of our currency.
"As such, the government should form a taskforce to understand the underlying problems contributing to high food wastage.
"Was the high food wastage due to consumers' buying more food than they can eat to break their fast or was it because of over-estimating the quantity of food to be prepared by the food hawkers?" he asked.
Mohideen said consumers might not be able to waste such an astronomical amount of food because that would incur expenses.
It was likely that the home-based food hawkers prepared too much food in anticipation of good business when Muslims purchase their food to break their fast.
If this was true, he said one had to consider several other factors. Those factors were:
* The food is prepared at homes where the refrigerator capacity, cooking stoves, and storage space are limited, thus increasing the likelihood of bacterial contamination;
* Most of the dishes have either meat and/or coconut milk that can easily go bad and it is not practical to bring stoves to heat up the dishes at the stall. Temperature of at least 74 degree Celsius is required to kill the bacteria in food, but the highest temperature during the day in Malaysia is around 33 degrees Celsius;
* The dishes have to be prepared early and stored in containers for hours between the time of preparation to the time they are displayed at the stall. During this time, at normal temperature, bacteria will multiply at a prodigious rate;
* Any unsold food is not likely to be taken back as some of the food has already gone bad and has to be discarded. Others have experienced food storage problems as many of these food hawkers are home-based, thus lacking commercial refrigerators and freezers. The food that remained at the end of the day had to be binned too. Moreover, they desperately needed all available containers for the food prepared the next day; and
* The hawkers have to depend on their customers and the food quantity they are buying. For the customers, even if they overestimated the quantity that their family members are going to consume, they will be held back by how much they are going to spend on the berbuka puasa (breaking of fast). However, the food hawkers will have no option but to hope for good business despite stiff competition from neighbouring food stalls.
Mohideen said on this premise, CAP urged the relevant authorities to consider:
* Requiring applicants to state the food that they intend to sell at a particular Ramadan bazaar. The authorities will then limit the number of stalls selling the same type of food. Business competition is good but if it is over saturated, it becomes untenable for some. This can be translated into food wastage as customers are spoilt for choice;
* The size of a Ramadan bazaar has to be determined according to the size of the community.We have to know that there is always a limit to the number and quantity of food a person wants to buy and this will then be related to the size of the nearby community. Consequently, businesses will be negatively impacted if the number of stalls are too many;
* Plan the Ramadan b
azaar early so that the authorities can plan the location of the stalls so that stalls selling the same type of food can be spread out;
* Encourage people to bring their own food containers and ask the food hawkers not to supply drinking straws for drinks or plastic forks and spoons. The reason is that these people are not expected to eat immediately but to take home for berbuka puasa and thus do not need eating utensils; and
* Food that is still in good condition can be donated to either Food Banks or to soup kitchens for the poor and homeless.
Mohideen said the selling of food at Ramadan bazaar should not be a free-for-all because if it became oversized, it would not benefit the hawkers and traders.
"On the contrary, it is going to result in food wastage, which has gone unresolved for decades," he stressed.