KUCHING: The state government is financing the development of a prototype harvester for the oil palm industry, revealed Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas.
He said that finding workers had always been a challenge in the oil palm industry, particularly fruit harvesters, as Sarawakians were reluctant to take on this tough job.
“Therefore, we are really looking forward to this mechanisation,” he said in an exclusive interview with the New Sarawak Tribune.
While the exact time of completion for the prototype was uncertain, he said that drones were also used in the industry to make it easier to identify which oil palms were already fertilised and so on.
“Now, we are also trying to use Internet of Things (IoT) to record the response of oil palm growth to the fertilisers,” he said.
Uggah, who is Modernisation of Agriculture, Native Land and Regional Development Minister, said that like any other industry, the oil palm industry had to cut costs and increase productivity in order to survive.
He said that the productivity of the agricultural industry including oil palm had been negatively impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic as workers could not be brought in due to movement restrictions.
“Initially we stopped Indonesian workers from coming in (to work at the farms and plantations), but then we were faced with another problem – they were coming in through the jalan tikus (illegal routes).
“So now we allow them to come in but in accordance with our standard operating procedure (SOP). That is how we regulate these workers,” he said.
According to Uggah, who is also Sarawak Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) chairman, the employers must provide transport for their workers from the border to the hotel where the workers would be quarantined for 14 days and tested for Covid-19.
He added that all these costs were to be borne by the employer.
