Chapter 29 The Pollination Story

1. 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 labor force in clearing and planting techniques we now had to re-train them in the skills of harvesting, pruning, fertilizing, maintenance and milling. Normally a developing oil palm plantation can start selling it bunches to a neighboring mill as soon as the palms 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 other palm oil mill in the region. However it would have been uneconomic to build the mill earlier before we had sufficient throughput. This meant that we had been investing for seven years without produc­ing a single dollar of income.
2. 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 our shareholders' investment. On 3 December 1967, we held a party in the Labuk Club to celebrate our first sale, when 200 tons of palm oil was export­ed to Liverpool on the Blue Funnel ship the MV Cyclops. On 31st December, 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 UPI'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 H&C.
3. 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.
4. And here we encountered our last and most intractable problem, a problem 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 ass 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 Ho and the research workers of the other plantation companies applied themselves to the problem. There were frequent visits by agronomists. 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 and this was due to lack of natural pollination. It seemed that this was characteristic of oil palms in Sabah.
5. The text books 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.
6. 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. When this was done, 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 Cameroons. Thereafter assisted pollination became, of necessity, a standard procedure on all the Sabah estates.
7. 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. The ideal instrument for this delicate operation turned out, by trial and error to be a vaginal douche, and the young lady in the Buying Department in London was surprised when we submitted an urgent order for several gross of these.
8. As the palms became taller it became difficult to find the receptive flowers. It was then found to be easier to use a mechanized 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 five hundred labors 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.
9. The large plantation companies like ourselves were able to organize 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, 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.
10. With the expenditure on assisted pollination, production costs on all the Sabah estates rocketed. Oil palm investment in the state ceased to have much attrac­tion. Over the next decade or two, 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.
11. The Tungud project seemed doomed to failure. So also did Lord Cole's dream of Sabah becoming a major centre for palm oil production.
12. 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. 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 at least as heavy as anything we experienced in Sabah. For a pexiod 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 palm's native habitat, the flowers were being pollinated in the wet season just as well as they were in the dry season. If the rain was washing the pollen out of the atmosphere in Sabah, why wasn't the same thing happening in Cameroons?
13. As early as 1965, in my November report I asked our Research Department in London if fluctuations in natural pollination could be, "Something to do with the insect population." I got a snappy reply from London advising me to study the text books more carefully. I would find that insects played no role whatsoever in polli­nating the oil palm. In 1976, by which time I had returned to London, I had a meet­ing with Dr David Greathead, the Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control (CIBC). The purpose of the meeting was to discuss work which the Institute was doing for us on the control of bag-worm using natural predators.
14. However, 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 Institute would be happy to carry out a detailed study on this on our behalf if we could provide the funds. We decided to take advantage of his offer. We were fortu­nate that the person the CIBC chose to carry out the study was Dr Rahman Syed, a distinguished entomologist from Pakistan. Dr Syed 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.
15. 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 a year later, 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.
16. Oil palm pollen, and the soft tissues of the dead male inflorescence, was 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 found 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 returned to the male flowers but only after the pollen on their bodies had been deposited on the female flowers. 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.
17. Dr Syed's initial findings were enough to persuade us to commission 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, but partly also by a species of tiny thrip, Thrip hawaiiensis. This small insect, which pollinated a wide range of different plants, had, in parts of Malaysia, adapted itself to the oil palm. As a relative newcomer to the job, it was of course a far less effective pollinator than the Elaeidobius, which explained why the fruit to bunch ratio in West Malaysia was lower than in Africa. 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.
18. A lot of puzzling observations clicked into place, and the text books had to be re-written. It was 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 the East, from the nineteenth century onwards, their natural eco-system, including their associated insect species had been left behind.
19. There was now general agreement in the industry that there would be major benefits in bringing the palm's natural pollinators to the East. We discussed this in KL with the then Minister of Agriculture, Dato Musa Hitam. He was rightly very cautious. History, as he pointed out, is full of examples of species introduced for what seemed good reasons, and then 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.
20. Dr Syed now returned 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 were 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, 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.
21. The tests were continued in Africa for further three years. Finally it was conclusively proved that the insects could not pose a danger to any other crop in Malaysia. The CIBC 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 the 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.
22. Mahbob is 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 his work at first hand in Africa, the scientists became enthusiastic supporters of the project. As regards the funding, the entire cost of the study from start to finish was in the region of two million Malaysian dollars. 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 Abdullah, after retiring from the plantation industry became a well-known short-story writer in Malaysia, and the pollination story, as seen from the Malaysian end, has been written up in his book, Planters' Tales.)
23. 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. 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 sterilized pollen through several generations and then transported in the pupal stage to Kuala Lumpur Botanic Gardens in July 1980 by Dr Syed personally. There they were again bred in quarantine.
24. After some months of further testing at the Botanic Gardens, one lot of weevils was released on Pamol Kluang in late February 1981. Two weeks later, on the 13th March 1981, a historic day for the Sabah oil palm industry, a further 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 re-uniting 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.
25. The State Government was very grateful for our company's contribution in solving the pollination problem, and both Dr Syed and myself were awarded Datukships as a result.
    After the release of the weevil in 1981, output increased and production costs reduced dramatically on all the Sabah oil palm estates. On Tungud, within two years of their release, we recorded an increase of 29 % in output of palm oil and 43% in kernel production. At the same time our labour force was reduced by over 500 workers. (All of them were quickly absorbed in development work.) I was particularly happy on a subsequent visit to Sabah a year or two later, to find that all the smallholders in the area, including Tasman and his friends in the Bayok and the Cocos Islanders on the Tungud river, were now, thanks to E.kamerunicus, produc­ing excellent crops and, were making a good living from their plots of oil palms.
26. With the improved profitability, the large plantation companies from West Malaysia were soon queuing up to invest in Sabah. The figures speak for them­selves. In the twenty years from 1960 to 1980 the planted area of oil palms in Sabah grew slowly from zero to only 94,000 ha. In the next twenty-five years however, following the release of the weevil, the planted area exploded by an average of 50,000 ha. per year, to reach a total planted area of 1.2 million ha. by 2005. (Interestingly enough by then, the area under palms in Sabah, at 16% was exactly the same as the percentage of land area of UK under cereals, rape seed and set-aside, and very much less than the total area of vines in France.)
27. Sabah had by 2005 become, agriculturally, the new frontier of Malaysia, and with exports of nearly 4 million tonnes, it was the largest producer of palm oil of all the states in the Federation. It is sad that several of the people who foresaw Sabah's full potential for palm oil production, Lord Cole, Sir William Goode, Tun Donald Stephens, and Tun Mustapha, had all died before this was achieved.