The government should take a more proactive approach toward solving the labour shortage issue in palm oil and other sectors, said Bangi MP Ong Kian Ming.
In a statement today, Ong took aim at Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s recent visit to Turkiye, which anticipated an increase in palm oil exports, saying that it proved to be a false promise if domestic issues in the production of palm oil products are not effectively managed.
“Even though Crude Palm Oil (CPO) prices have increased from just over RM2,000 per metric ton in 2019 to a high of more than RM7,000 per metric ton in May of this year - it has fallen since to slightly over RM4,000 - domestic producers of palm oil and related products have not been able to adequately capture the benefits of this price increase.
“According to statistics compiled by the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB), production of most of the categories of palm oil products decreased in 2020 and 2021 and still have not yet reached back to 2019 production levels even as the economy has opened up in 2022,” he said.
Ong brought up the fall of CPO production from 2.3 million tonnes in 2019 to 2.2 million tonnes in 2020 and further to 2.05 million tonnes in 2021.
According to him, cooking oil production was reported to have fallen from 574,488 tonnes in 2019 to 406,777 tonnes in 2021, a fall of 29.2 percent.
Even though the domestic and global economy started opening up in 2022, Ong claimed that palm oil production has not been able to return to pre-pandemic levels.
“CPO production from Jan to May 2022 is less than for the same time period in 2020. Crude Palm Kernel Oil production from January to May 2022 is 23.6 percent lower than the same time period in 2019,” he added.
Continued uncertainties
Ong said it is unlikely that the labour shortage in the palm oil sector, which the Malaysian Estate Owners Association (MOA) estimates at approximately 120,000, will be rectified in 2022.
“This is especially with continued uncertainties at the government-to-government level between Malaysia and Indonesia with regard to policies which are supposed to be in place to protect foreign labour in Malaysia, especially in the plantation sector,” he added.
Ong expressed that this shortage is an example of the more significant failure of the government to establish a coordinated approach to address this issue across all pertinent ministries, including the Home Affairs Ministry, Human Resources Ministry and International Trade and Industry Ministry.
“This policy failure is one of the factors which have led to domestic supply chain bottlenecks and disruptions that also partly explain the increase in the cost of production, the cost of the final products and recent shortages in some items, including cooking oil.
“The government should not take the same approach of banning the export of palm oil-related products in order to ‘solve’ domestic shortages of cooking oil,” he said. - Mkini
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