21.11.2020 (www.theborneopost.com) - KUCHING: The Sarawak Oil Palm Plantation Owners Association (Soppoa) has called upon the state and federal governments to allow for a consignment of relief foreign workers to enter the state.

Soppoa said the workers would come in on condition of full compliance with the State Disaster Management Committee (SDMC)’s regulations and standard operating procedures (SOP) to inspect and verify employee health status – with only those free of Covid-19 after the mandatory 14-day quarantine and Covid-19 tests to be admitted.

Since the enforcement of the Movement Control Order (MCO) in March this year, Soppoa said oil palm estates in Sarawak had resorted to their own strict SOP apart from SDMC’s, such as self-lockdown in the rural areas, which had proven effective so far.

“Allowing new recruits to come in for plantation work during this peak crop season with good crude palm oil (CPO) prices of more than RM3,000 per metric tonne, would provide relief to the industry, which has suffered much over the last two years – where CPO prices were only hovering about RM2,000 per metric tonne. Companies are still suffering financial losses and still finding difficulties to pay bank loans, other borrowings, and vendors.

“The survival of the industry lies squarely in the hands of the government and surely, it can make a difference if the government help comes in time before the industry has to again appeal to the government to help keep the industry afloat,” Soppoa said in a statement yesterday.

In comparison with the agro-commodity sector of Europe and the US, the association said vegetable oil growers were much protected by the government and were subsidised and incentivised in many ways to encourage them to thrive.

“Here in our country, the oil palm industry is undisputedly the most taxed industry compared to all other industries in the country by the government in billions of ringgit and yet, when we appeal for relief workers to survive, we are just not reciprocated – plantation companies, one by one, would be forced to close down due to the lack of support from the government,” Soppoa said.

As such, it said it was willing to listen and cooperate with the government to forge a win-win solution as the agriculture sector in Malaysia, especially the agro-commodity section, played a significant role not only in the nation’s economy, but also the survival of thousands of farmers and their families, who depended on this industry for a decent living.

“Unless the government wants the industry to go into bankruptcies and farmers flooding to the cities for jobs, leaving the countryside behind, the association urges the government to act now before it is too late,” said Soppoa, adding that the industry currently requires ‘intensive care’. The association pointed out that the palm oil industry in Sarawak was the highest contributor of revenue to the state under the agriculture sector, but it had been severely handicapped by the severe shortage of harvesters during this peak crop season with current good CPO prices, which otherwise could have generated more revenues for the state and helped the planters to ‘survive better during this Covid-19 pandemic’.

“Over the years, the palm oil industry in Sarawak has invested billions of ringgit of hard-earned money in the state through the development and setting up of estates, palm oil mills, and refineries.

“This industry in Sarawak has grown to be the biggest oil palm growing region in Malaysia with 1.6 million hectares planted.

“This has also provided businesses and investments for other spin-off and related industries like machine spare-parts and hardware, fertiliser, equipment and food, non-food manufacturers, traders, and other services,” said Soppoa chief executive Andrew Cheng.

He said the industry had consistently been providing stable employment to thousands of local and foreign workers, contributing to the wealth and prosperity of the state, enabling many native landowners and their families to become smallholders where the majority of them enjoyed self-employed livelihoods from oil palm cultivation.

“Over the past years, Sarawak has progressed economically and many locals have ventured to the cities and overseas for opportunities, leaving our rural settings almost devoid of workers. Furthermore, for locals currently employed in the palm oil industry in Sarawak, about 60 to 80 per cent of them are in the skilled and semi-skilled categories,” he said. Due to Covid-19, the country had stopped new foreign workers entering Sarawak since March and this had aggravated the already-acute shortage of workers – causing the industry to head towards an almost certain business closure for most plantation businesses, big or small.

“There are simply not enough workers to harvest the fruits, which are the only source of revenue for estates. This, in turn, has turned to unrecoverable financial losses for the companies due to late or partial harvesting.

“These unharvested perishable crops are rotting away, gradually leading to lower crop yields and quality of palm oil, which contributes to further loss of overall income.

“Worst, in many instances, these fruits which are left unattended due to shortage of harvesters, render the earlier high investment costs and efforts incurred for agronomic input such as fertilising and husbandry to generate these valuable products, to just being wasted.

“With less income from the lower crops being harvested due to worker shortage, the companies are curtailing overall spending to survive, and this would directly and indirectly impact the value chain and subsequent shrinking of the state’s agro-commodity economy,” he said.

Cheng added that for estates that were forcefully abandoned, it would take about two to three years for them to turn around and become productive again; hence, this  was also a reason why the shortage of workers could lead to the worsening of the situation in Sarawak.