KUCHING: Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas has revealed that a number of unscrupulous traders have lately been importing pepper from Vietnam and Indonesia then mixing and selling them as Sarawak prime pepper.
He said this was a challenge as Sarawakian pepper was widely regarded as a premium product with high quality.
“Now we are appealing to the Pepper Marketing Board to be stricter and more stringent so that our pepper remains premium,” he said in an exclusive interview with New Sarawak Tribune on Wednesday.
Uggah said that he was also encouraging Area Farmers Associations such as in Betong by supporting them with machinery and facilities to develop downstream products and meet the requirements of the international market.
The Minister of Modernisation of Agriculture, Native Land and Regional Development emphasised that the pepper industry must be maintained.
“Pepper is a very important product for rural areas. From 1998 up until about five years ago, at one time the price of pepper was RM50,000 per tonne,” he said, adding that this was a lucrative point for pepper farmers as many of them had about 3,000 pepper vines.
However, he said that like any primary commodity, pepper prices fluctuated.
“Now, the price has dropped by about 50 to 60 percent. Thus, we are trying our very best to come up with subsidies to make sure that these farmers do not abandon their pepper gardens, because there will be a time when the prices will increase.”
Another problem, he said, was that most of the state’s pepper farmers were from the older generation.
On another note, Uggah said that the Covid-19 pandemic had not really affected pepper farmers as they were still allowed to go to their farms.
