9 Oct 2011

A suggestion in managing the high cost of living in Malaysia...

The cost of living has been arising and it is indeed a problem for everybody.  While in my opinion there was no concrete measure ever made to combat this issue, here i would like to suggest the government to consider this...
Malaysia is relatively a small country in terms of land area, yet we have so much in our plates i.e. manufacturing, palm oil, rubber etc. !  I humbly reckon that the government should now re-consider this and focus on what we do best.  I want to give an analogy for this.  As an individual, we  cannot do fishing, planting vegetables, building our own homes, sewing our clothes and running a business at one time.  That is impossible!  What  we can do is outsourcing.  We keep our day to day job that we do best and we get our needs such as foods and stuffs from a hypermarket.  Why can't we use the same logic for addressing the high cost of living here?  In that context, why can't we go to the countries that have larger undeveloped land areas and lower labour cost and high rate of unemployment such as Vietnam.  We have the money and they require jobs.  We can set up a corporation (own by Petronas or Sime Darby) to do plantations, livestock farmings etc. there and then re-export the commodities back to Malaysia.  We can do this since we have MISC which happens to be under the control of government to ship those products back to Malaysia at lower cost. Since these commodities are ours and meant for our consumptions, government should not impose any tax on them and this would significantly reduce the price.  Now we have cheaper foods at more manageable costs for the rakyat .  The advantage for us is that we get cheaper products and we can control the price, while for that country (e.g. Vietnam), this will provide jobs and incomes for them.  Isn't this a win-win scenario?  Rather than depending on other countries such as Brazil and India whom can manipulate the prices of foods at their pleasures, now we can have our own continuous supply of food with a more manageable price system.  If we can do palm oil plantation in Indonesia simply because the costs are lower, why can't we do the same for rice, vegetables, chicken and meat?  I reckon, this could be a concrete long term solution for such problems rather than blaming other countries (e.g. Brazil etc) for selling goods such as sugar cane at higher price to us and because of that we change to another exporter country.  What do you think?     

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