Authorities are conducting on-the-ground inspections across Yangon Region to verify whether cooking oil is genuinely being sold to consumers, according to U Kyaw Kyaw Lwin, Deputy Director General of the Department of Consumer Affairs under the Ministry of Commerce.

The inspections cover retail and wholesale shops located in wards across all 44 townships of Yangon Region, officials said.

“We visit retail and wholesale shops in the wards and check their sales records. Based on those records, we randomly visit households to verify whether they actually received the cooking oil and to confirm the quantities sold, as claimed by the shop owners,” U Kyaw Kyaw Lwin explained.

He added that the methods of selling cooking oil vary from one location to another and are not uniform across the region.  “We do it every week. The shops that were inspected last week will be inspected next week or continuously,” U Kyaw Kyaw Lwin continued.

Officials from the Yangon Region Consumer Affairs Department, officials from the Myanmar Oil Merchants and Oil Entrepreneurs Association, and relevant administrative bodies also participated in the random inspection of representative shops that are authorized to distribute edible oil in Yangon Region.

Palm oil is imported from abroad, divided into two categories: public palm oil and industrial palm oil.

More than 40,000 tons of public palm oil are imported per month, while more than 10,000 tons of industrial palm oil are imported per month, according to the Ministry of Commerce and Trade.

The countries of import are Malaysia and Indonesia, with most of the imports coming from Indonesia.