Malaysia Matters Podcast

…Palm oil, that is. Reddish gold. Sime Tea.

Ok, so the Jed Clampet thing doesn’t work all that well here. Forget about it.

But the importance of palm oil to the Malaysian economy shouldn’t be underestimated.

Malaysia is the world’s largest palm oil exporter. And, apparently, plantation owners have been successful enough at squeezing that stuff out (palm oil), that government officials have figured they ought to be able to squeeze a bit more themselves (taxes).  

Palm oil farmers with more than 40 hectars of land will get a new monthly bill that…

…will be at three percent of the profit made for every one metric tonne of FFB in plantations in Peninsular Malaysia and at 1.5 percent rate for plantations in Sabah and Sarawak.

Those that don’t comply with this tax will face steep penalties, including jail time.

About half a million people in Malaysia either grow the crop, or are connected to the industry. Malaysia is the word’s leading producer of the stuff which quite possibly may “have now surpassed soybean oil as the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world.”

So what’s the big deal with an additional few percent tax on profit?

True, there are reserves now, but indications point to demand for the product increasing ever more.

Under the weight of increasing food and fuel costs, leaders at the D8 are calling for a shift away from biofuel crops in favor of ensuring that sufficient quantities of food are produced.

Abdullah Badawi, the Malaysian prime minister, said the use of arable land for biofuels “should be stopped because such action will deepen the global food scarcity and further drive up food prices”.

“We must not allow the zeal for energy security to come into direct conflict with the basic need for food production,” he told the Developing Eight summit in Kuala Lumpur.

Data is beginning to support the contention that instead of attaining fuel security, the escalation in production of biofuels has instead been directly responsible for the increasing distortion of food prices as well as increases in the costs of fuel.

Last Friday the Guardian Newspaper printed a story on an as-yet unpublished World Bank report that indicates biofuel policy and production is responsible for a 75% increase in global fuel prices.

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as “the first real economic crisis of globalisation”.

“Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate,” says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

But from a much less empirical standpoint, shouldn’t the implications of intermingling food and fuel policies have seemed lacking in common sense right from the start?

After all, when I was a kid, my mother told me that it was bad manners to play with my food. I can only imagine that burning it would have horrified her.

It’s not often that one gets to meet a head of state, and it’s even more rare to have a substantive conversation with him. Less common than either is to have the head of state make you breakfast afterward. On Sunday morning, I had the privilege of doing all three with Malaysian Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Abdullah bin Haji Ahmad Badawi.

The purpose of our meeting with the Prime Minister was to spend a few moments alone with him, and ask him whatever it pleased us to ask. I’ll let my colleague Jerome Armstrong speak for his end of things, which he has already done quite well. For my part, I was interested in the PM’s thoughts on the concept of Islam Hadhari, which we’ve written on here previously. (Unfortunately, no recording was allowed, and verbatim transcripts are beyond my ken — but I can give approximate quotes. The photos here are original.)

As we’re here in Kuala Lumpur to attend the Third International Conference on the Muslim World and the West, inquiring about Islam Hadhari seemed particularly apropos: as a model for the Islamic approach to state and society, it has much to recommend it when set against its competitors within the Muslim world. By way of prefacing my question, I mentioned Badawi’s 2005 remarks in New Zealand, and he affirmed that this was an accurate expression of his aspirations for Islam Hadhari. He then went on to say — and was insistent upon my understanding — that Islam Hadhari is not a theological affair, but purely civil and societal. I wondered whether this was for my benefit, or whatever Malaysian audience his comments might reach. (Indeed, Malaysia Matters does, judging from site traffic, have a meaningful Malaysian readership.) It is, according to him, a necessary precondition for the maintenance of Malaysia as a state that is simultaneously Islamic and pluralistic: no mean feat, as history and current events show.

On the whole, as one might expect, Islam Hadhari as presented by the Prime Minister in our conversation — and as evidenced in his governance — appears quite benign and even constructive. Certainly, in my own travels in the Muslim world, ranging from Turkey to Jordan to east Africa, Malaysia strikes me as the most appealing from a Western perspective. With a nearly free press, an active democratic life, and a striking plurality of ethnicities and faiths (upon which we’ll be writing more shortly), it has none of the depressing and artificial ethnic uniformity of the Turkish and Arab lands, and vastly better governance than any of the African states. Though there is a long tradition of pundits and public figures getting quite wrong impressions from personal meetings with genial foreign leaders, I will go out on a limb here and state that Abdullah Badawi struck me as not merely saying the right things, but as sincerely believing and acting upon them. Though there is plenty to criticize about him and his country — see my colleague Jonathan Wynne-Jones’s report in the Daily Telegraph for one rather notable example, or this — but the gap between both and their peers is nonetheless so large that it seems, to the un-objective observer, somewhat ungracious to dwell upon it.

And then he made me breakfast.

More striking than anything the Prime Minister said in our brief exchange was his behavior afterward. The Prime Ministerial residence outside of Kuala Lumpur is quite a bit more modest than one would expect — more in the style of a well-heeled gated villa in Miami-Dade than the southeast Asian palace of my own imagination — and it is well-appointed and cozy inside, with a decor of leatherbound books, Malaysian hardwoods, and various animals that the Prime Minister, a sporting man, has killed over the years. (He is rather proud of the latter: upon taking our leave, he made sure to grab my arm, point toward a magnificent pheasant in a glass case, and say, “I shot that!”) Adjacent to his office is a sort of library and reception room, to which we media types retired upon the conclusion of our PM time. We expected to eat breakfast with Badawi’s communications man, and then retreat to the warren of concrete and causeways that is Kuala Lumpur.

Off to the side of the room was a large table upon which were arrayed many bowls of Malay spices, and, to my confusion, a large tureen of ordinary porridge. What to do? “Let me show you,” said someone behind me, and I turned to see the Prime Minister reaching for the empty bowl in my hands. “You will not regret this,” he said, “This is my breakfast — a Malay breakfast.” He scooped a large serving of porridge into my bowl, and then proceeded to add heaping servings of the adjacent spices. “Roasted garlic,” he said, and then named the rest in Malay: a potpourri of green herbs, burgundy nuts, brilliant red chilis, and more. He stopped at the chilis, and shot me a look — “Do you want these?” Yes, I said. “You should not take on too much,” he announced, and gave me the tiniest serving. Finally, he squeezed a lime over it all, handed me the bowl, and told me to mix it up.

I did, trying not to look dubious. I took a bite of the multihued, Malay-spiced porridge. It was the most delicious breakfast dish I have ever tasted. “Malay breakfast!” exclaimed the smiling Prime Minister. The rush to replicate the concoction began, and my own breakfast was delayed as I assisted several media members in creating their own Prime Ministerial porridge.

What’s the purpose in relating anecdotes like these? Some do it because it illustrates to others their casual closeness to the holders of power, but I like to think that Calvin would remind me that I get served breakfast by a head of state through grace rather than merit. In that light, it’s useful as a humanizing corrective to the usual media scrum that surrounds public figures. Whatever one thinks of Dato’ Seri Abdullah bin Haji Ahmad Badawi, know that as a man he is kind and approachable — and he makes a fantastic porridge.