For the next few years, the question of pollination was never far from our minds. Our accountants in London were not slow to remind us that we were not making an adequate return on our investment. Pamol Kluang was far more profitable. Apart from the four expatriate-owned pioneering companies, none of the other big Malaysian plantation companies showed any inclination to start operations in East Malaysia.
Every time I thought about the pollination problem, there was something which kept nagging at me. When I worked as a young Assistant on Ndian Estate in Cameroons, the rainfall in the wet season from June to October was as heavy as anything we experienced in Sabah.
For a period of three or four months it used to rain virtually every day. And yet we saw no increase in the number of rotten bunches five months later. To put it another way, it seemed that in Africa, in the oil palm’s native habitat, the flowers were being pollinated in the wet season just as well as in the dry season. If the rain was washing the pollen out of the atmosphere in Sabah, why didn’t the same thing happen in Cameroons?
As early as 1965, in my November report to London, I asked our Research Department if fluctuations in natural pollination could be ‘something to do with the insect population’. Our head of research was an interesting character named Sebastian de Blank. He replied to my query by advising that if I read the textbooks more carefully, I would see that insects played no role in pollinating the oil palm.
In 1976, by which time I had returned to London as the vice-chairman of UPI, I had a meeting with Dr David Greathead, the Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control (CIBC). The purpose was to discuss work which the CIBC was doing for us on the control of bag-worm, using natural predators.
During our discussions, I happened to tell Dr Greathead about the pollination problem in Sabah. He was very interested in my theory that insects might play a role in the pollination of palms in Africa. He suggested that the CIBC would be happy to carry out a detailed study on this on our behalf if Unilever would fund the project. Bob Dawson, then Chairman of Plantations Group, gave his consent and we decided to take advantage of the offer.
We were fortunate that the person the CIBC chose to carry out the study was Dr Rahman Syed, a distinguished entomologist from Pakistan. He was already well known to us, having previously visited Tungud in connection with outbreaks of nettle-caterpillars. He was a meticulous and methodical scientist, much respected by our managers.
Dr Syed arrived in Cameroons in June 1977. He spent the months from July to October studying insect activity on the palms on our Lobe Estate. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he reported back to Dr Greathead and ourselves that his preliminary observations left him in no doubt that pollination in Cameroons was done mainly by insects.
Dr Syed’s report, ‘Studies on Pollination of Oil Palm in West Africa’, was published in June 1978. It has since become a well-known classic in the field of entomology. He proved, in a whole series of carefully controlled experiments, that the oil palm in its original habitat, was pollinated by several different insects, the most prominent being varieties of the weevil Elaeidobius. Wind dispersal, Dr Syed reported, played only a very small part in Africa.
Oil palm pollen and the soft tissues of the dead male inflorescence were the weevils’ only source of food. They laid their eggs and their grubs developed, in the dead male spikelets. They were attracted to the male flower by its strong smell of anis. It was obvious then why the insects visited the male flowers. Why however did they visit the female flowers which provided nothing for them to eat?
Dr Syed made the crucial discovery that, when the female inflorescence was receptive, its temperature increased. This caused it to give out a mimic scent of anis. The weevils, heavily laden with pollen grains attached to their bodies, were attracted by the scent. They crawled all over the female flowers looking for food. Finding they had been fooled, the weevils then returned to the male flowers but only after the pollen on their bodies had been deposited on the female flowers.
Dr Syed estimated that, during the period of receptivity, over 5,000 weevils visited each female inflorescence and that each weevil carried up to 600 pollen grains on its body. These initial findings were enough to persuade us to commission Dr Greathead and the CIBC to go ahead with a much more extensive study, both in West Africa and in Malaysia.
After a series of experiments in Johore, Dr Syed reported that pollination there was indeed being carried out partly by wind, as the scientists in Malaysia had claimed, and partly also by a species of Thrips Hawaiiensis.
This small insect, which pollinated a wide range of different plants including coconuts, had adapted itself to the oil palm in some parts of Malaysia, but it was not found in Sabah. As a relative newcomer to the job, the thrip was of course a far less effective pollinator than Elaeidobius, which explained why the fruit-to-bunch ratio in Johore was lower than in Africa; the thrip’s absence from Sabah explained why pollination there was worse than in Peninsular Malaysia.
Connection made
Dr Syed’s report on insect pollination in Africa came as a bombshell to research workers in Malaysia. It was widely discussed and swiftly accepted. A lot of puzzling observations now clicked into place, and the textbooks had to be rewritten.
It was now clear that the Elaeidobius species had, in their native habitat in West Africa, evolved in a symbiotic relationship with the oil palm over millions of years. However, when the oil palm seeds were originally taken from Africa to Southeast Asia from the 19th century onwards, their natural eco-system, including their associated insect species had been left behind.
There was now general agreement in the industry that there would be major benefits in bringing in the oil palm’s natural pollinators. The person who had taken over from me as chairman of our plantations in Malaysia was Joe Walton, previously the head of our plantations in the Solomon Islands. He raised the matter of importing the insects with then Minister of Agriculture Dato Musa Hitam.
Musa was rightly very cautious. History, as he pointed out, is full of examples of species, which were originally introduced for what seemed good reasons, turning, like the rabbit in Australia, into major pests. Musa said he would need to see very concrete proof that the weevil could not damage any of Malaysia’s commercial crops before he would give approval to bring it in.
We then sent Dr Syed back to Cameroons to carry out further experiments. All three of the main Elaeidobius species were tested on every conceivable crop. In each case the weevils simply died off. They had become so specific to the oil palm through aeons of evolution, that they were unable to breed on any other plant, even on other palms like date palms or coconut palms.
For many reasons, Dr Syed decided that the most suitable insect for transferring to Malaysia was Elaeidobius Kamerunicus, a name which was to become familiar to every oil palm planter in the world.
The tests were continued in Africa for a further three years. Finally it was conclusively proved that the insects could not pose a danger to any other crop in Malaysia. Dr Greathead reported that E. Kamerunicus was probably the most intensively-studied insect ever to be transferred from one continent to another.
By then, the General Manager of Pamol Sabah was a young and energetic Malaysian, Mahbob Abdullah. He was put in charge of the final stages of ‘Operation Elaeidobius’. I asked him to try to get the backing of government scientists for the transfer of the insects to Malaysia, and also to try to persuade the other oil palm companies in Sabah to contribute towards the overall cost of the research.
Mahbob was a persuasive man. He was successful on both counts. He personally escorted a party of Malaysian scientists including Dr Kang Siew Ming, the head of the Malaysian Plant Quarantine Department, on a visit to our estates in Cameroons. After they had met Dr Syed and observed the CIBC’s work at first hand in Africa, Dr Kang and the other Malaysian scientists became enthusiastic supporters of the project.
As regards the funding, the entire cost to Unilever of the study from start to finish was in the region of RM2 million. Mahbob was able to persuade the oil palm members of the East Malaysian Planters Association to share this cost on a per acre basis. It was to prove the best investment they ever made. (Mahbob, after a distinguished international career in the plantation industry, became a well-known writer; the pollination story, as seen from the Malaysian end, has been written up in his classic book Planter’s Tales).
With the backing of Dr Kang’s department, the Minister finally gave his blessing to the import of the weevils. Once clearance had been given, the final step was to ensure that the weevil did not carry with it to Malaysia any pathogens harmful either to the oil palm or to the insect itself.
Comprehensive tests
Closely supervised by the CIBC, a collection of weevils was transported from Africa to Kew Gardens in England, each insect in an individual glass tube. They were tested to ensure that they contained none of the known oil palm pathogens.
They were bred on sterilised pollen through several generations and then they were transported in the pupal stage to the Kuala Lumpur Botanic Gardens in July 1980 by Dr Syed personally. There they were again bred in quarantine.
After some months of further testing, one lot of weevils was released on Pamol Kluang in late February 1981. Two weeks later, on March13 – a historic day for the Sabah oil palm industry – 2,000 weevils were released at a small ceremony on Tungud. Further consignments were released on all the other Sabah estates a month or two later.
The effect of reuniting the weevil with its natural host, the oil palm, in the absence of any of its natural predators was spectacular. They multiplied with a speed which was more in the nature of an explosion. Within a few months every oil palm in Malaysia was being pollinated by clouds of E Kamerunicus.
Output increased and production costs reduced dramatically on all the Sabah oil palm estates. On Tungud, within two years, we recorded an increase of 29% in output of palm oil and 43% in kernel production. Our labour force was reduced by over 500 workers – all of them were quickly absorbed in further expansion.
With improved profitability, the large plantation companies from West Malaysia were soon queuing up to invest in Sabah. The figures speak for themselves. In the 20 years from 1960-80 the planted area of oil palm in Sabah grew slowly from zero to only 94,000 ha. In the next 25 years, following the release of the weevil, the planted area exploded by an average of 50,000 ha per year, to reach a total of 1.2 million ha by 2005.
By then, the area under oil palm in Sabah, at 16% of the land area, was almost the same as the percentage of the UK land area under cereals and rapeseed, and very much less in total than the area of vines in France. Sabah had by 2005 become, agriculturally, the new frontier of Malaysia. With exports of nearly 4 million tonnes of palm oil, it was the largest producer of all the states in the Federation.
It is sad that several of the people who foresaw Sabah’s potential for palm oil production, including Lord Cole, Colin Black, Sir William Goode, Tun Donald Stephens and Tun Mustapha, had all died before this was achieved.
Datuk Leslie Davidson
Author, East of Kinabalu
Former Chairman, Unilever Plantations International
This is the second part of an edited chapter from the book published in 2007. It can be purchased from the Incorporated Society of Planters; email: isph@tm.net.my
