NRC to focus on enhancing food security, agrofood sector - Muhyiddin

KUALA LUMPUR - Bersatu president Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said the National Recovery Council (MPN) will be focusing on enhancing food security by looking into ways to increase the country’s food supply and the agrofood sector.

He said a roundtable session with economists, entrepreneurs and academicians has been held to discuss on how to accelerate short-term, intermediate and long-term National Recovery Plan (NRP) in the country.

Muhyiddin who also chaired the meeting said the issue revolved around coming up with ways to enhance food security and the agrofood sector in the country.

“As of now, positive impacts could be seen but there were still issues to look into such as restraining existing regulations that were made quickly and impacted certain sectors such as the domestic investment and so on,” he told reporters after the roundtable session at the Malaysian Investment Development Authority (Mida) Tower, today.

He added that the items presented would be brought to the recovery council and the results would be made known to the public.

Muhyiddin also said the issue on subsidy was also discussed during the meeting as it was brought up by many parties.

“We have also discussed targeted subsidies, not just reducing the subsidies but also on subsidies that needed to be maintained for certain groups who are entitled to receive them.

“We had a roundtable session on the matter and there are follow-up actions that the secretariat of the National Rehabilitation Council is taking which is to come up with measures and allocations from the government to reduce the burden of industry players.

“Over RM77 billion will be allocated on subsidy if the prices of goods keep on spiking,” he said.

Commenting further, he said the the government might not be able to bear with the increasing subsidy, hence that was why the matter needed to be looked into.

Asked about the shortage of foreign workers issue, Muhyiddin said he was disappointed that the issue on the entry of foreign workers into the country has not been resolved.

“I am quite disappointed. The issue should have been resolved as it is a demand for various economic sectors including the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), farming and construction which require foreign workers,” he said.