International reporting
Malaysia: palm oil seeks workers
Audio 02:30
A palm oil plantation in Malaysia.
(Illustrative Image) REUTERS/Lim Huey Teng
By: Gabrielle Maréchaux Follow
3 mins
It is a commodity which it would be difficult to do without today: palm oil.
However, on the side of its main producers in Southeast Asia, the pandemic has reduced yields.
In Malaysia in particular, the palm oil industry is now seeking to attract more local workers or to empower work that has remained almost the same for a century.
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From our regional correspondent,
Palm oil is present in half of the products of a supermarket, and the global demand continues to increase.
In this palm oil plantation 70 kilometers from Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, Norizah is an exception for an astonishing reason: this mother is Malaysian.
“
Before, I worked in an electronics factory.
When the pandemic arrived we had to confine ourselves and then when it was time to resume, I asked if there were no free positions here, because at the factory, we were all very close to each other. others, there were not too many safety distances and I was afraid of catching the Covid.
»
The plantations where Norizah has been spraying fertilizer for four months have been very empty since the arrival of Covid-19 and this is a source of concern for Ezzaruddin Abdul Rapar, at the head of this Sime Darby plantation: "
The harvests are done less frequently, so inevitably there are more ripe fruits, the work is therefore slower and therefore a lot of fruits are lost, because they have rotted.
»
Free housing for the employee's family, productivity bonus, payment of medical expenses, hiring of convicts and drug addicts.
However, Malaysian plantations have tried almost everything to recruit local workers to replace the 85% of their usual workforce who came from abroad before the pandemic closed the borders.
A job with the four “D”s
An unprecedented labor crisis which for Datuk Nageeb Wahab, head of the Malaysian Palm Oil Association, is indicative of deep shortcomings.
“
Malaysia has industrialized over the years, workers have been attracted to other sectors, manufacturing, banking and interest in palm oil has declined.
And then the work in the plantations is considered as work with the four "D" in English: difficult, dangerous, degrading and dirty.
This pandemic is therefore an eye-opener, especially after the problems of accusations of forced labor that we had.
And today we are therefore very seriously interested in the automation of plantations.
We are therefore interested in exoskeletons, drones, robotics, and we are looking at it seriously, because until then, we were less motivated, we said to ourselves before the pandemic that foreign labor would always be the.
»
An ambitious and unprecedented modernization which will undoubtedly take time, notes Alain Rival, CIRAD researcher based in Indonesia.
“
Mechanization will not happen overnight.
It means putting electronic detectors, finding a system to make these fruits fall from a tree that is 15 meters high.
There are also qualitative questions, that there is no point in picking fruits that are not ripe.
They have to have the full maturity rate, and that's done by eye, the pickers do it from twenty meters away because they're at the bottom and the fruit is at the top, that's how it works for 100 years.
»
But with prices reaching historic peaks, and record yields compared to other vegetable oils, mechanized or not, palm oil remains an unparalleled windfall in Malaysia.
► Also to listen: In Southeast Asia, the price of palm oil has exploded since the beginning of the year
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