KUCHING: It’s a bountiful year, farmers and orchard owners should be laughing, but they are not.
Their initial joy has turned to grief.
They were happy when their fruit trees began flowering, but they are certainly not laughing all the way to the bank now because overabundance has caused prices to drop to their lowest in years.
In almost all towns and cities in Sarawak over the last couple of months there has been an oversupply of various types of fruits,
There are even special offers of all-you-can-eat durian sessions to entice customers.
This situation is definitely not to the advantage of orchard owners as agents simply pay the lowest prices to take the fruits which otherwise would get rotten.
Unfortunately, this is common in Sarawak due mainly to the lack of market, transportation and repackaging or reselling opportunities.
Philip Wong, director of Sarawak Institute for Public Affairs (Sipa) at Jalan Padungan here has been observing this sad state of affair and in his desire to see something done to stop the fruits going to waste season after season, he reminded the relevant authority (in this case, the state agriculture ministry) to make good on its promise to look into the plight of the farmers and orchardists.
“One request made has been for the farmers to be grouped into cooperatives in different regions and also to seek investors to market the fruits in different forms. The fruits can be canned, processed into various forms, or even exported fresh frozen,” said Wong in a letter to the New Sarawak Tribune.
Wong, who is an entrepreneur and author with a Masters in Development Economics (Canada), is passionate about travelling, having visited over 100 countries to date.
Through Sipa he hopes Sarawak could become a more prosperous, harmonious and fair society.
“All efforts must be geared towards overcoming the issue most obvious in Sarawak – the vastness of the state and lack of good roads to quickly ship fruits to the required destinations,” Wong added.
The other issue, he pointed out, was the seasonal nature of the fruits.
“This is something that cannot be changed, which poses another issue of what to do with the processing machines during the rest of the year when the fruits are out of season and not available for processing,” he said.
Hence, he thought that perhaps the most practical solution is for the state to partner with private enterprises to set up processing centres at various locations during the fruiting periods.
Overtime, the state could pinpoint the various types of fruits or vegetables to be planted to sustain the production centres during the course of the year with non-seasonal fruits like papayas, lemons, oranges and watermelons.
Wong suggested that the ministry determine a fixed minimum price for the fruits, admitting, however, that this would be difficult to enforce due to the varying distances of the farms/orchards to the collection centres.
He also pinpointed the other big problem, which was the lack of good roads in remote areas.
“Until the roads have been improved, they will continue to hinder any initiative to solve the problem of overabundance of fruits.”
