THE Covid-19 pandemic has forced many businesses to undergo significant changes in order to stay alive and relevant.
Sime Darby Plantation, which has 50,000 hectares of land in Sabah and the fifth largest plantation in the State, is no exception.
Sime Darby Plantation Berhad Group Managing Director Mohamad Helmy Othman Basha (pic), speaking at the Sabah International Business and Economic Summit (SIBES), said the pandemic has provided a real opportunity to recruit locals who have shied away from the plantation sector for the past 20 to 30 years.
“I’m sure many of us are aware that the plantation industry relies heavily on manual labour, and that this has been the case for the past 100 years.
“Yes, there has been a lot of talk about automation and mechanisation, but we are far behind our competitors in the edible industry, and we haven’t done much.
“But in 2020, something changed, at least for Sime Darby Plantation in terms of the labour crunch, because we couldn’t basically recruit any more foreign workers into the country.
The labour shortage has had a significant impact on the sector. Borders have been closed and we are in a state of flux,” said Helmy, who was one of the summit’s invited speakers.
“I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and while I was well aware of our history, I was more interested in the future, in how we could change it, and the Covid-19 pandemic offered us with that opportunity,” he said.
The pandemic has spurred them to fast accelerate everything they did. Within a year, within a span of 12 or 13 months, Sime Darby Plantation was able to do something they couldn’t do for many years: change the phase of the business.
“I am very proud to announce that we now have drones flying across our plantation, including those in Sabah. We have machines that are doing work that has replaced the human labour of plantation workers,” he said.
“What I’m most proud of is that this has created a genuine opportunity to hire locals, because locals have shunned the plantation sector for as long as I can recall, perhaps 20 or 30 years.
“We may now rehire locals to work on plantations in higher-paying positions. Pilots are in charge of the drones; they are what we refer to as machine specialists, and they are in charge of the machines on our plantation right now,” he said.
“This has offered the chance, and it is opening up the possibility for locals to return in a significant way, and I believe the transition will continue; we are not looking back, but rather accelerating, and this is something really exciting for us.
“To me personally, this is something that is sustainable, this is something where we can shift the perspective of how people look at plantation, especially since plantation is very essential not only for Sabah but for the nation as well,” he said.
Currently, Sime Darby Plantation employs roughly 1,700 Sabahans, with nearly 1,200 of them working as plantation labourers and the rest as executives and employees.
“However, as I previously mentioned, this business is heavily on foreign employees; we currently employ roughly 3,000 foreign workers on our plantation in Sabah, but figures are changing. We’ll see more Sabahans coming to work on the plantation in higher scale jobs,” he said.
He also said that Sime Darby Plantation is committed to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability and has taken several steps to demonstrate this.
“We have a lot of activities in Sabah; we have the world’s largest ecological experiment project, Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (Safe), with Yayasan Sime Darby as the largest funder providing more than RM30 million,” he said.
“In collaboration with the Sabah Forestry Department, we rehab and reforest the Orangutan habitat in Northern Ulu Segama, planting more than 300,000 indigenous trees,” he added.
Sime Darby Plantation recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Nestle for Project Relief, which intends to plant one million trees across 1,200 hectares of riparian zones, buffer zones and steep slopes across all Sime Darby Plantation estates, with more than 300 hectares in Sabah.
Sime Darby Plantation is also aggressively expanding towards renewables, with Helmy pointing out that Sabah offers a lot of options to harvest, such as solar or other renewable energies like biogas from mills.
“I believe this is all the exciting projects and activities that we should be looking forward to. We are here to stay and we are here to contribute to the growth of Sabah,” he said.
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