Sepupus, I’m very proud to announce that recently I had the chance to have a conversation and an interview with Malaysia’s very first Royal Society fellow, Dr. Ravigadevi Sambanthamurthi!
Dr. Raviga is a biotechnologist who works with palm oil, and she was Founding Director of the Malaysian Palm Oil Board‘s Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Centre, as well as initiator of the Oil Palm Genome Project.
Through Dr Ravigadevi’s work, oil yields were improved because of the SHELL gene and the MANTLED gene identifications, allowing palm oil cultivators to select high-yielding through that increased land use efficiency, and land-use efficiency was increased; workers could harvest oil palm more reliably and effectively because of the VIRESCENS gene selecting for colorful fruit.
These achievements were recorded in back-to-back articles in the prestigious science journal Nature and unprecedented for Malaysian science as a whole.
I have a very deep and abiding respect for science, and on your part, you might be wondering: why is this relevant to the Malaysian economy?
Well, it is relevant because a sizable part of the Malaysian economy is built on palm oil.
Palm oil represents around 3 % of Malaysia’s national gross domestic product (GDP) and contributes nearly 38 % of our total agricultural output. In 2022 alone, the industry exported approximately 15 million tonnes of palm oil and related products, generating RM 137 billion in revenue and adding about RM 40 billion directly to GDP. The sector also supports livelihoods across the country, with plantations spanning nearly a fifth of Malaysia’s land and employing hundreds of thousands of people, particularly smallholder farmers whose operations account for over 50 % of the workforce in this industry.
Gross Domestic Product: the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a country’s borders over a specific period of time. In this context, the total monetary value of all goods and services produced in Malaysia in the course of a year.
Palm oil is also extremely important in many different types of goods and services in our economy, namely:
- Our cooking oil
- As an additive to lots of different food products
- As an oil in the oleochemical industry
- And…
It is also part of fascinating narratives about discrimination, land use, agriculture – the stuff of myth to the point that it has in fact been called the alleged Lord Voldemort of the plant world, as Dr. Raviga discusses in this excellent video.
If you want to watch our conversation, you can do so right down below!
Enjoy the conversation and I’ll see you in the next one ahead.
P.S. Incidentally, Ms. Raviga is the mother of at least one Sepupunomics reader. What a surprise!
