As a financial, trading and industrialised nation, Malaysia is a lucrative marketplace bursting with opportunities, despite the years of economic upheavals. Depending on their entrepreneurial smarts, innovation and initiative, Malaysians have the panache to take up professional jobs and carry out start-ups that provide a middle-class existence.
Business can be good, hawking food or products, capitalising on the stock market and entering into major infrastructure development. Observe the foreign direct investment bullishness. The point is, job and business opportunities are boundless, the litmus test being the post-Covid-19 pandemic economic recovery.
The creativity to sell using 21st-century finesse, new age marketing or old-style adroitness is, in recent decades, evident in the gentrification of historic suburbs. New, gleaming buildings — big, medium and small — have sprouted, touting new lifestyles of dining, shopping and doing business.
A common thread interweaving these initiatives is the high-speed Internet broadband that has powered a new age of capitalism: the reign of e-hailing entrepreneurs and social media influencers hawking considerable endorsements.
Yet there is one entrepreneurial prospect that Malaysians bypassed: the commodities and agriculture sectors that require a strong back to reap the benefits. Granted, it's not jobs for the weak-willed or the weak physique: mental and physical agility is a pre-requisite, exemplified by Felda settlers and independent smallholders who rake in tidy earnings of up to RM20,000 a month.
Profiting from global oil palm price surge, settlers and smallholders marvelled at their ability to capture soaring prices while boosting their harvest without attracting a price-depressant glut.
Fruit bunch prices in the first 10 months of this year ranged from RM800 to RM900 per metric tonne, but have since spiked to RM1,200. The high prices are a salvation: after a long lull, oil palm planters are able to save and settle simmering debts, although they are relying heavily on foreign migrant workers.
Over the decades, Indonesians have virtually monopolised the plantations. But as foreign labour peaked at 80 per cent, the big labour spread was taken up by Indians, Nepalese and Bangladeshis.
Regrettably, the RM20,000 earning power still isn't a sweetener for Malaysian youths to enter a plantation, let alone work there, deterred by perceptions of harsh working conditions, aggravated by exploitation and little avenue to air grievances.
Various agencies in the plantation and agriculture sector should be lauded for trying to reduce foreign labour dependency.
For now, however, such jobs seem to be the exclusive haven for low-skilled migrant workers, who learn hard to negotiate the working problems.