In response to the fake egg incident, the Veterinary Services Department came up with a proposal to stamp eggs with the Grade of the egg, place of manufacture, expiry date and collection date etc. Wanita Gerakan Deputy Chief Ng Siew Lai said that it is not a bad idea to carry out a blanket accreditation standard on eggs, however, she also said that the additional cost of stamping should not be born by consumers.

Recently, the Chairperson for the Egg Unit of Federation of Livestock Farmers’ Associations of Malaysia, Yap Hoong Chai said that the stamping of each egg could lead to a price hike of 4 cents per egg.

Ng Siew Lai is also Penang Gerakan Wanita Chief. She says, 4 cents increase per egg is much too high, thus unacceptable as it will cause a sudden inflation in the market. Eggs are widely used in the Food & Beverage industry, an increase of prices of eggs will definitely lead to inflation of food price which at the end, the end users will again be the group who suffers.

To resolve the matter from the root cause, Ng Siew Lai urges for the cooperation of a few important authorities. First of all, the Customs Department needs to ensure that there is no importation of eggs from China, because as far as we know, there had been news of fake eggs being produced in that country.

Secondly, the Veterinary Services Department may carry out spot check on the various egg production farms to monitor the quality of the eggs being produced.

Last but not least, the Health Ministry should educate the public on how to differentiate fake eggs from real eggs, it is crucial that the end users learn how to identify the eggs themselves and protect themselves for it is quite unlikely that every single egg be checked and certified, that checking measure itself will incur a lot of expenses on the government and the farmers which eventually the additional expenses will be passed on to the end users.

Ng Siew Lai added, stamping on the eggs to certify the genuity of eggs is not an ultimate solution to the problem because it is possible that the measure could be abused somewhere along the line. Hence, educating the public is still the best and absolute way to solve the problem.