Smallholders Encouraged To Exploit Pepper Potential

KUCHING, April 4 (Bernama) -- Smallholders, especially in Sabah and Peninsular should also consider taking up pepper farming as it is three times more profitable than cultivating oil palm," said Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Tan Sri Bernard Dompok.

He said acreage for pepper growing in the country currently stood at 14,160 hectares with 99 per cent or 14,056 hectares in Sarawak while Johor and Sabah were the other biggest pepper producers.

"Profit (for pepper) is three times more than for oil palm for the same estate size," he told reporters after handing over aid and incentive payments to pepper and cocoa smallholders at Kampung Pichin's multi-purpose hall in Serian near here today.

He said an acre produced the same yield for both commodities at four tonnes but the ex-farm price for pepper was RM12,000 per tonne while oil palm (ffb) sold only at RM3,300 a tonne.

Dompok said Malaysia now produced around 24,000 tonnes of pepper annually and was the fifth biggest producer of the commodity after Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Brazil and China.

Serian is the leading producer of pepper in Sarawak contributing to 31.5 per cent of the annual output.

Earlier, at a similar function with oil palm smallholders at Taman Rekreasi Ranchan, Serian, he said the ministry was applying for additional funding from the Federal government for cocoa replanting.

He said this was because acreage under cocoa had dropped draastically from 200,000 hectares to only 20,000 hectares now as more and more cocoa smallholders preferred to cultivate oil palm.

As for oil palm cultivation, he said, there were 69,594 smallholders in the country cultivating a total of 661,331 hectares with 10,417 smallholders in Sarawak where the total acreage stood at 58,800 hectares.

He added that the government was providing various assistance to support smallholders and that RM42 million was allocated since last year towards this purpose for oil palm smallholders in Sabah and Sarawak. -- BERNAMA

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