Kok (second left) shakes hands with Uggah after the press conference. Also seen are Malaysia Palm Oil Board acting director-general Dr Ahmad Parveez Ghulam Kadir (left) and Malaysian Palm Oil Certification Council chief executive officer Chew Jit Seng.
KUCHING: Oil palm planters are urged to get the Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) certification before it is made mandatory after Dec 31 this year
The certification is for ensuring palm oil produced are sustainable and of high quality, and can be exported to European market.
The federal Minister of Primary Industries Teresa Kok said the government will pay 50 per cent of the preparation cost of the certification and 100 per cent for oil palm smallholders with farms below 1,000 hectares.
“The offer ends Dec 31 this year, and we urge all oil palm growers to get certified so that we can achieve the previous goal of 100 per cent certification by 31 Dec this year,” she told a press conference after a dialogue with oil palm planters and industry players here yesterday.
She said the target was set by the previous minister in 2017 and she did not intend to change the target in order to keep up with the momentum.
Currently, the certification is at 36 per cent nationwide.
She further explained that the target was set at 100 per cent in accordance with the Amsterdam Declaration 2020 where seven major countries in Europe require palm oil entering Europe to be 100 per cent certified sustainable.
She added many rural oil palm farmers were yet to get the certification and needed the state government’s help with land matters.
She said the problem arose due to some midsize estate owners not managing their farms themselves and needed to be tracked down.
Thus, she went to the ground with Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah, who is also state Minister of Modernisation of Agriculture, Native Land and Regional Development, to meet with the growers and explain to them why the certification is necessary.
Meanwhile, Uggah said that in Sarawak, 22 out of 32 smallholders in Sustainable Palm Oil Cluster (SPOC) areas had obtained the certification, and the remaining 10 would obtain the certification by this year.
He said SPOC smallholders are not a problem but those with 100 to 1,000 acres whose owners needed to be tracked down are.
“For those who are not certified, they can’t sell their fresh fruit bunches and their oil are not accepted for export, or maybe the oil is accepted as second class oil which is sold at low price,” he said.