Bring in foreign workers urgently, estates plead with govt
06/06/2022 (Free Malaysia Today) - The Malaysian Estate Owners’ Association (MEOA) has expressed hope that work permits will be issued to mid-sized and small plantations with the same urgency as with larger firms.
It said the labour crunch was affecting the whole oil palm industry.
As such, the association was pleased to hear that a large company had been allocated permits to bring in a group of workers from Lombok, Indonesia, recently.
“This means that the process of issuance of permits has started,” Bernama reported the association as saying in a statement today.
It hoped the entire process could be kick-started without delay so that all companies — big, medium or small players — would benefit from the return of workers to Malaysia.
MEOA said at the start of 2022, it was estimated that the local oil palm industry was facing an acute shortage of 120,000 workers.
The Malaysia Productivity Corporation had stated that this shortage of workers would deprive the industry and the nation of a massive RM28 billion in revenue from unharvested fresh fruit bunches this year.
MEOA said Malaysia was missing out on the growing global demand for palm oil as it is unable to cope with the harvesting of all of the oil palm fruit bunches due to the limited labour force.
It warned that this acute labour shortage would also affect future earnings.
MEOA said many plantations would try to manage their labour productively by channelling scarce human resources towards crop harvesting. This would mean lower priority being given to other work in the fields, including palm maintenance and fertilisation.
It warned that this would eventually affect field conditions and crop yields. It would make harvesting of fruit bunches difficult if the oil palm fronds are not cleared.
Employment agencies call for action
The National Association Of Private Employment Agencies Malaysia has called on the government to immediately approve the entry of foreign workers from Bangladesh to fill the gaps in local industries.
The group also urged the government not to restrict the entry of foreign workers from Bangladesh to just a handful of agencies, but instead, to include all members of the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agents.
“Why is it that special agencies are only required in Bangladesh for the purpose of recruiting workers to Malaysia when there are no such requirements for other source countries (for foreign workers),” Papsma president Megat Fairouz Junaidi Megat Junid was quoted as saying in an Utusan Malaysia report.