With the commissioning of the factory and the completion of our first 10,000 acres, the whole emphasis now swung from development to production. Having trained our labour force in clearing and planting techniques, we now had to re-train them in the skills of harvesting, pruning, fertilising, maintenance and milling.
Normally, a developing oil palm plantation can start selling its fresh fruit bunches to a neighbouring mill as soon as the trees start yielding. There is therefore some sort of income coming in within three years or so. In our case this was not possible, since there was no palm oil mill in the region. However, it would have been uneconomic to build a mill before we had sufficient throughput. This meant that we had been investing for seven years without producing a single dollar of income.
As Lord Cole had reminded us, now that we had met our target on the development side, the next objective was to prove that we could at last make a reasonable return on Unilever’s investment.
On Dec 3, 1967, we held a party in the Labuk Club to celebrate our first sale, when 200 tons of palm oil were exported to Liverpool on the Blue Funnel ship the MV Cyclops. On Dec 31, we exported our first 50 tons of palm kernels to Rotterdam on the City of Guildford.
To avoid any problems with transfer pricing, it was Unilever’s policy not to sell any of its plantation products direct to other Unilever companies. In line with our usual practice, therefore, we sold our oil through a selling pool, in this case the Sabah Palm Oil Pool, managed by Harrisons & Crosfield.
Every visitor to the plantation had been impressed with the exceptionally good growth of our young palms. They were well ahead of similarly aged palms in Johore and even further ahead of anything in West Africa. As we had speculated after the flood in 1963, the rich deposits of riverine alluvium, allied to the humid climate and high sunshine levels, provided ideal growing conditions.
The important thing however was not how well the palms would grow, but how well they would yield. As our Research Director Hereward Corley often reminded us, when he came to put the breeding programmes on a more scientific basis, it is not always the fattest lady who has the most children.
And here, on the question of yield, we encountered our last and most intractable problem: one which was to threaten the whole future of the Sabah oil palm industry. We began to find that a very large number of bunches did not seem to ripen properly. The fruits simply rotted on the bunch.
At first we thought this was probably due to the occasional flooding, however as our palms grew taller and the bunches were above the usual flood level, there was no improvement. The other three oil palm estates in the state confirmed that they were encountering the same problem, although not perhaps to the same extent as we were.
Chris Hoh and the research workers of the other plantation companies, applied themselves to the problem. There were frequent visits by consultants. The first conclusion was that the cause might be a fairly common disease known as bunch failure.
However this idea was discarded when it was found that the reason for the large number of rotten bunches was poor fruit-set. It was finally confirmed that the problem was due to lack of natural pollination. It seemed that this was a characteristic of the oil palm in Sabah.
The textbooks were unanimous in reporting that the oil palm was pollinated exclusively by wind. They cited several characteristics which indicated that the oil palm is a typical wind-pollinated species. In dry conditions, pollen from the male flowers blew into the atmosphere and settled on receptive female flowers.
The scientists concluded that the frequent rain experienced in Sabah was washing the pollen out of the atmosphere, thus inhibiting natural pollination. On the CDC estates, pollination, although very poor, was rather better than ours. Since the rainfall in the Tawau region was considerably less, this gave some weight to the scientists’ theories.
Without assisted pollination the weight of fruit to bunch in the Labuk was only around 30%. In Johore the figure was nearer 55%, whilst in Cameroons it was over 65%. We started experiments with hand pollination. This consisted of collecting pollen from male flowers and puffing it over receptive female flowers.
It was found that, when the bunches ripened five months later, the fruits had developed normally. (It usually takes around five to six months for a pollinated bunch to reach the ripening stage.) With hand pollination, we began to achieve pollination standards close to the Johore levels, although it was still not as good as in Cameroons.
Thereafter, assisted pollination became, of necessity, a standard procedure on all the Sabah estates.
Costly exercise
A female flower is receptive to pollination for around three days. This meant that every palm on the plantation had to be examined every three days to see if it had any receptive female inflorescences. As ever-increasing areas came into production this became a more and more costly operation.
Teams of workers patrolled the estate daily, searching for male flowers and collecting the pollen. This was then issued to other teams who went round pollinating every receptive female flower with hand puffers.
As the palms became taller it became difficult to find the receptive flowers. It was then found to be easier to use a mechanised blower to blast the pollen, mixed with talcum powder to give it some bulk, into the crown of every palm on the estate at three-day intervals.
As our mature area expanded, we were eventually employing 500 labourers per day on pollination alone. It was an expensive business but there was no alternative. We carried out experiments with aerial pollination but they were not successful. Hand pollination seemed the only alternative.
The large plantation companies were able to organise the assisted pollination operation, but for smallholders like my friend Tasman in the Bayok, or Mandore Dick and his Cocos Islanders on their new scheme, or Titi’s daughter-in-law Ah Moi, who had planted a few acres of palms in the upper Tungud, it was too complicated and time-consuming. They simply harvested the few naturally pollinated bunches.
However this did not provide them with much of an income. With the expenditure on assisted pollination, production costs on all the Sabah estates were extremely high, and the yields were disappointing.
Oil palm investment in the state ceased to have much attraction. Over the next decade or two, only one or two local companies were tempted to start plantations. The Tungud project seemed doomed to failure. So also did Lord Cole’s dream of Sabah becoming a major centre for palm oil production.
Datuk Leslie Davidson
Author, East of Kinabalu
Former Chairman, Unilever Plantations International
This is an edited chapter from the book published in 2007. It can be purchased from the Incorporated Society of Planters; email: isph@tm.net.my
