The oil palm sector has recorded at least 40 Covid-19 clusters spread across six states while there are more than 300,000 undocumented migrant workers whose vaccination status are unknown and are feared to be seeking refuge deep in these plantations, said a migrant welfare activist.
Migrant Care Malaysia representative Alex Ong said according to data derived from the Health Ministry’s GitHub data repository, as of Nov 15, there were eight active clusters in the oil palm sector, comprising five clusters in Pahang, two in Sabah and one in Johor.
“The eight active clusters have recorded a total of 609 cases but two of these clusters broke out as early as September and another two broke out in October. The active cluster with the highest number of cases is the Kinabatangan 2 cluster, which was announced on Sept 1 with 244 cases.
“Within the first 15 days of November, the sector recorded four new clusters with a total of 164 cases.
“Three of these clusters were recorded in Pahang districts - Lipis, Bera and Rompin - while the fourth was in Kinabatangan, Sabah,” he said, adding that these two states charted the highest number of Covid-19 clusters, each recording 15 clusters respectively, since March last year.
Ong said the sector recorded a total of 3,028 cases and five deaths since March 1, 2020.
He added that the overall Covid-19 clusters logged under this sector in the remaining four states since last March were five clusters in Sarawak, Johor (three), Malacca (one) and Kelantan (one).
High cluster-density districts
In Pahang, Ong said data showed that the plantation area in Felda Chini 3 that is under an enhanced movement control order (MCO) until Nov 25, is the second cluster in the Chini plantation area in four months.
He explained that between Aug 23 and Sept 6, 71 people had tested positive in another plantation-related cluster in that district.
“Meanwhile, there have been four clusters in the Bera district alone, situated southwest of Pahang since Aug 21 and as of mid-November, the latest cluster there was still active with 51 cases.
“The four clusters are Kemayan, Chini, Bera Selatan and Mengkarak,” he added.
Ong pointed out that Kinabatangan also showed high cluster density.
“There were nine clusters in the Kinabatangan district alone since last April and the latest cluster there was active in mid-November with 64 cases, bringing the total number of cases in oil palm plantation-related clusters in Sabah to 1,506,” he said.
Malaysiakini is seeking a response based on these statistics from Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin.
This is on whether the ministry would use the GitHub data to identify and investigate, jointly with other ministries or not, the districts with more than two oil palm plantation-related clusters, such as in Kinabatangan, Bera and Chini, for vaccination status of all workers.
However, Bernama reported on Nov 21 that the ministry would introduce a heightened alert system to detect early signs of an increase in Covid-19 cases. In the report, Khairy had revealed that some sectors would be tightened if there was an increase in cases.
Undocumented workers exist despite labour shortage
Ong expressed concern that if undocumented migrant workers were not vaccinated, it could pose a very serious health and security risk to the country. Plantations are wide and it is very easy for workers who know their way around to remain deep in these plantations without being detected.
“There are still thousands of undocumented migrant workers hidden deep in 5.9 million hectares of oil palm plantations and this was despite reports of labour shortage in the industry throughout 2020 and 2021,” he said.
In early September, Human Resources Minister M Saravanan announced that the freeze on migrant labour into the country would be lifted only for 32,000 workers to enter the oil palm plantation sector and special quarantine premises near Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) would be identified to accommodate at least 2,000 workers at a time.
Ong said that the Malaysian Palm Oil Association (MPOA) had reported acute labour shortage, especially harvesters since 2020 and the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) revealed that the crude palm oil (CPO) production in 2020 was 3.6 percent or 0.72 million tonnes lower than the year before.
However, despite this dip, total export earnings had grown owing to a rise in CPO prices.
“Export revenue last year was RM72.30 billion and 7 percent higher compared to the RM67.55 billion earnings in 2019.
“MPOC also indicated that the dip in CPO production was due not only to labour shortage for harvesting but also disruptions in the plantations’ harvesting and milling processes caused by the MCO last year.
“Based on the CPO readings, harvesting and processing must have been carried out and for this to happen, there were workers in the oil palm sector who were carrying out these jobs. The Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFB) don’t fly from tree to mill,” he quipped.
Counting the uncountable
In justifying the numbers in the undocumented population, Ong pointed out that the MPOA and the government have indicated that at least 70 percent of workers in this sector were migrants.
“This means about 300,000 workers in the plantation sector are undocumented migrants,” he said.
Ong based his estimation on workers required to harvest a hectarage area estimated by MPOC to be 5.9 million hectares of oil palm plantation and according to industry practices, one person was required for an average of every 10ha.
“That would require a labour force of about 590,000 workers of which 70 percent or 413,000 workers are estimated to be migrants. To find out how many are undocumented, we minus the number of workers registered with the Immigration Department and take into consideration the labour shortage of 32,000 workers declared by MPOA.
“A government representative had recently revealed that roughly 142,000 migrant workers in the oil palm sector were registered with the Immigration Department. If we remove these figures from the estimated migrant labour in this industry, we can approximate at least 239,000 migrants working in this sector are undocumented.
“This figure is likely to be closer to 300,000 workers if the total hectarage was closer to 6.5 million as estimated by a recent Khazanah Research Institute (KRI) report and more than 400,000 if the worker-to-hectarage ratio was one worker to every 7ha,” he explained, taking into consideration the land capacity of smallholders in this sector.
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