Tek Talks: Oil palm: From solidarity to shared learning and celebration

This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 11, 2026 – May 17, 2026

There are times in the plantation industry when competition is useful, even necessary. Traders will trade, exporters will jostle and companies will benchmark yields, costs and efficiencies against one another. That is normal. It keeps the sector alert.

But there are also moments when an industry must recognise that not every matter should be treated as a contest. Some challenges are too large, too structural and too consequential to be handled company by company or country by country. In the oil palm world, that should be obvious by now.

The sector faces common pressures in sustainability, labour, mechanisation, productivity, certification, trade barriers, public scrutiny and the stubborn difficulty of telling its story with both confidence and credibility.

Too often, responses come in fragments: one association issues a statement, one company drafts a rebuttal and one country pushes back while the wider narrative moves on without waiting for growers to gather their thoughts. In such a setting, solidarity is not sentiment. It is strategy.

The common ground among palm oil producing countries is wider than many suppose. Whether one speaks to growers in Malaysia, Indonesia or beyond, the recurring themes are much the same: better yields or oil extractions, better agronomy, stronger smallholder support, improved mechanisation, more credible sustainability, fairer trade treatment and the hope of being judged by evidence rather than caricature. These are not isolated irritations. They are shared realities.

The Covid-19 period offered a timely lesson. During that difficult stretch, the Malaysian palm oil sector showed what real solidarity could look like. Associations, companies and stakeholders found common ground, worked on practical standard operating procedures and coordinated more closely in the interests of business continuity, worker safety and national economic stability.

The point was not that differences disappeared but that the industry proved it could close ranks sensibly when circumstances demanded it. That lesson deserves a longer life.

When solidarity must outlive crisis

And that longer life should begin with learning. For all the modern language about environmental, social and governance, resilience and transformation, one older truth remains: this industry will only be as strong as its people and its people will only remain strong if they never stop learning.

Plantation life has always taught that experience matters but experience alone is not enough. Mud teaches. So do mistakes. But professions advance when experience is shared, tested, organised and passed on.

This is why institutions such as the Incorporated Society of Planters (ISP) matter and, perhaps, matter more now than ever. ISP has long served as a professional home where generations of planters and other practitioners learn, exchange and raise standards.

Through ISP’s The Planter, conferences and structured training programmes — including the International Junior and Senior Management Programmes (IJMP and ISMP) — they represent something quietly invaluable: a professional home where knowledge travels, memory is preserved and judgement is sharpened. Its reach has already extended beyond planters to include millers and other stakeholders across the value chain.

That role deserves to be appreciated more broadly across the supply chain. Modern palm oil is not just about growing bunches well, important though that remains the sacred beginning. It is also about milling efficiency, quality control, traceability, logistics, downstream demand, biomass use, data, innovation and the expectations of markets and policymakers far beyond the estate gate.

Where field, mill and finance meet

The recent ISP International Palm Oil Millers Conference 2026 reinforced a timely point: in today’s harsher market climate, milling excellence means far more than merely processing fruit well. Mills must reduce losses, squeeze more value from every tonne, turn waste into wealth and use artificial intelligence, digitalisation and better data to sharpen performance. Even small innovations matter. 

Even so, this journey must be pursued with prudence weighed against cost-effectiveness, risk management and the overriding need to preserve business continuity. Progress must not only be ambitious but also commercially sensible and operationally steady.

And if the industry hopes to attract Gen Z and, one day, Alpha, it must tell that story better. Good narratives matter. Young talent must be shown purpose, innovation, sustainability and modern value creation — still built on steam, steel and skill but increasingly also on data.

Which is why the profession should think less in compartments and more in bridges. That, perhaps, was one of the clearest takeaways from the conference: a timely call to pursue shared learning. A planter who ignores mill realities is only half-informed. A miller who forgets field constraints may optimise the wrong things. And finance people, however essential, do not always begin with mud on their boots or mill dust on their sleeves. Numbers matter greatly but they must converse with reality.

Which is why planters and millers should also learn to speak the language of finance with greater confidence — internal rate of return, net present value, compound annual growth rate and the rest — so that operational wisdom is not out-argued simply because it is less numerate in the room. A stronger palm oil industry therefore requires shared learning not only from field to mill to market but also across the divide between operations and accounts.

Nor should learning be imagined as flowing in only one direction. Malaysia and Indonesia may rightly be regarded as long-standing anchors of oil palm knowledge but the profession should remain humble enough to recognise that excellent work is now emerging more widely across other producing countries. No serious profession should be embarrassed to learn from others. It should be embarrassed only when it stops learning.

Still, an industry that learns together should also, from time to time, remember together. And an industry that remembers together may eventually discover that it can celebrate together too.

Happy Palm Oil Day

A “Happy Palm Oil Day” is more than a cheerful whim. If producer-country solidarity is to endure, it should not remain confined to conference speeches, trade advocacy and formal communiqués. It should also take on a public face — warm, educative and memorable enough to reach schools, homes and communities.

Done properly, such a day would not be propaganda in festive dress. It could become a day of informed appreciation, public education and responsible pride, recognising not only the product but also the people behind it across the supply chain.

It would also help producing countries tell a fuller story about palm oil — not one of perfection but one of food systems, livelihoods, export earnings, resilience and national significance.

Imagine exhibitions, open days at estates and mills, youth activities, public talks, cooking festivals, sustainability showcases, smallholder awards and storytelling that links the breakfast table to the plantation and the mill to the laboratory. Let the public encounter palm oil not merely as controversy but as science, work, history, livelihood and industrial possibility.

Perhaps this is the sequence the industry now needs most: first solidarity, then shared learning and, from there, thoughtful celebration. In the years ahead, palm oil will continue to face scrutiny and rising expectations.

So yes, let producers compete in excellence. But let the profession also close ranks where it must, learn where it should and celebrate where it can. The finest seasons in plantation life are cultivated together.

Joseph Tek Choon Yee is a former president of the Malaysian Estate Owners’ Association and past chief executive of the Malaysian Palm Oil Association