Each day, Siti Rohani fries hundreds of traditional Indonesian snacks at her roadside stall in Medan, North Sumatra, including three kinds of doughnuts, fried tempeh and tofu, banana fritters, spring rolls and curry puffs.

All that frying means Rohani goes through a lot of cooking oil – up to five litres (169 fluid ounces) a day.

The only problem for Rohani is that cooking oil is becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of amid chronic shortages across the archipelago.

After soaring prices of crude palm oil caused prices of cooking oil to spike more than 50 percent, Indonesia’s government in February capped the price of a litre of oil at 14,000 Indonesian rupees ($0.93). To limit shortages, authorities also began limiting customers to 2 litres (68 fluid ounces) of oil per purchase.

“I had to go all over town from one place to another to buy another litre or two of oil, or to find out that the next place had sold out completely,” Rohani told Al Jazeera. “It just made everything even harder.”

The price cap, which has since been lifted, also had another undesired side effect, according to Posman Sibuea, a lecturer in food technology at Santo Thomas Catholic University in Medan.

“What happened was that cooking oil vendors didn’t want to sell their oil at such a low price, so they started hoarding it,” he told Al Jazeera. “Actually, there are stocks of cooking oil all over the country, but we just don’t know where they are.”

In recent months, the price of crude palm oil used has surged by up to 40 percent, the result of a confluence of factors, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which supplies the majority of Europe’s sunflower oil. With the Ukrainian sunflower oil supply disrupted by the conflict, demand for other oils like palm oil has soared.