Harvest is great, workers are few

2

State’s oil palm industry losing RM1 billion annually through uncollected fruits; turns to Bangladesh for workers

KUCHING: The state’s oil palm industry loses about RM1 billion annually through fruits left to rot in plantations because there are not enough workers to harvest them.

To stem this wastage, the industry in the state would need to recruit at least 30,000 more workers to harvest all the fruits in the plantations.

Most of the workers are recruited from Indonesia, but the establishment of many oil palm plantations in Indonesia has put a tremendous strain on the labour supply chain.

Minister of Land Development Tan Sri Datuk Amar Dr James Masing said his ministry had to turn to Bangladesh to address this acute labour shortage.

“We are losing some RM1 billion a year from uncollected FFBs (fresh fruit bunches). The estimated number of workers needed to collect these FFBs is about 30,000. Because of that, we are sourcing workers from Bangladesh to work here for the purpose,” Masing told thesundaypost here Friday.

To expedite the recruitment, Masing said his ministry was working out an arrangement for plantation owners to recruit the workers directly from Bangladesh on a business-to-business (B2B) basis.

He said he had discussed the mechanism on how to recruit these workers for the state with Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr Zahid Hamidi during their recent trip to that country.

Masing said because Sarawak had autonomy on immigration, Zahid agreed that these workers could be flown directly from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Kuching without stopping in Kuala Lumpur to process their work permits.

“To prevent workers from jumping from one sector to another, the government has come up with ‘colour-coding’ passes for the workers so that they will stay in one particular sector while they are employed here. By doing so, we will also ensure they will not overstay in the country.”

During the visit, Masing said Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina Wazed’s only request of Malaysia was that the workers’ welfare be well taken care of.

Bangladesh, on the other hand, was ready to supply between three to four million workers to Malaysia to work in the critical sectors such as plantations, construction and manufacturing.

Masing said the state needed some 150,000 foreign workers in the three sectors.

Meanwhile, Masing, who is also PRS president, said the state had cultivated some 1.2 million hectares of land for oil palm.

“Our target is to plant two million hectares of oil palm by 2020. To achieve a developed-state status by 2020, the state has to be private-sector driven. Oil palm has been identified as one of the major sectors to propel the state to that goal.”

Last year, the sector contributed some RM425 mil in sales tax to the state.