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Leslie Davidson, then a young plantation manager
in Nigeria, was sent by Unilever to Sabah in Borneo
in 1960 to plant oil palms on a long-abandoned
tobacco estate. They chose him because he could
speak Malay and Hakka (the Chinese dialect used
locally). They had bought the estate from Miss
Wright, an elderly woman on the Isle of Arran who
had found the title deed among her papers.
He
paddled up the Labuk river and built a grass hut on
stilts which in 1963 was washed away by a
flood.
Eventually, he developed an oil-palm estate
which now covers 25 square miles. It had a serious
problem, however. The palms, a long way from their
home in West Africa, grew well but the fruit came
to nothing, because pollen from the male flowers
failed to reach the female. In the end he had to
employ 500 people to pollinate them by hand.
Textbooks said that palm fruit were wind-
pollinated. Scientists thought the heavy rain was
washing the pollen away. Leslie Davidson was
unconvinced. He had worked earlier in Cameroon
where the fruit got pollinated even in the wettest
season, and the fruit bunches were surrounded with
buzzing insects. He was sure they were
insect-pollinated.
In 1976 he returned to London as deputy chairman
of Unilever Plantations and got permission to test
his theory. Dr Rahman Syed, an expert from the CAB
International Institute of Biological Control at
Ascot, was sent to find out how oil-palms were
pollinated in Cameroon.
He quickly found several pollinating insects.
Later he also found that, in Peninsular Malaysia,
oil palms were pollinated by thrips normally found
on coconut palms. These thrips did not thrive in
Borneo and anyhow were not good at their job. They
could not pollinate young palms.
In Cameroon the most effective pollinator proved
to be a weevil, Elaeidobius kamerunicus, which
lives on pollen from male oil-palm flowers to which
it is attracted by a scent like aniseed. Female
flowers when ready for pollination mimic this
scent, attracting pollen-covered weevils. These
insects have become completely adapted to the palm
in its natural environment over millions of
years.
Four years of research showed that the weevils,
unlike the thrips, thrive only on the West African
variety of oil palm and will not damage any other
plant. So it was safe to introduce them to
Malaysia, including Sabah. They were released there
in 1981 and brought a big increase in crops as they
spread through Malaysia’s 300 million oil palms.
Estates had problems handling the larger palm
bunches. A Malaysian minister estimated that
palm-oil output in 1982 increased 400,000 tonnes,
and palm kernels 300,000 tonnes, with a total value
of US $370 million.
The hand pollinators did not lose their jobs. It
was a time of labour shortage, and they were
transferred to other work. The weevils were of even
greater help to smallholders who did not have the
facilities for collecting and drying pollen for
hand-pollination.
Sabah rewarded both Leslie Davidson and Rahman
Syed with the title Datuk (knight). The Cameroon
weevil has since been introduced to other countries
in South-East Asia, the Pacific and South
America.
While working in Sabah, Leslie Davidson also
helped the local plantation industry by taking up a
suggestion from a Filipino fed up with carrying
heavy bunches of palm fruit. “Why not let me bring
a buffalo?” he asked. A buffalo-cart was designed
on the estate and its use spread throughout the
area.
For a plantation worker, acquiring a buffalo
proved to be like opening a bank account since it
grows bigger and can eventually be sold for a
higher price. Buffaloes are still used in Sabah,
and Unilever similarly introduced the use of
draught animals in Zaire, Colombia and Ghana.
Later, as the chairman of Unifield in Bedford,
Leslie Davidson helped promote tissue culture.
Since palms will not grow from cuttings, cell
culture offers the only way of producing
high-yielding clones. Unifield has produced
hundreds of thousands of clonal plantlets in test
tubes and exported them all over the tropical
world.
Leslie Davidson was educated at Bankhead Academy
and Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen, from where,
he says, everyone goes overseas. The army sent him
to do national service in Kenya. Then he saw a
Unilever advertisement: there was a vacancy on an
oil-palm plantation at Kluang, Malaya.
What they did not tell his mother, who had to
sign the application because he was not yet 21, was
that Kluang was a hotspot of the post-war Communist
Chinese insurgency. “I didn’t expect to live
through it,” he says. “One or two of my friends
were killed.”
“On one occasion my death was announced. Someone
else, a finance officer, had come from Kuala Lumpur
and my estate manager took him to see the new
development area where I was working. They walked
straight into an ambush and the visitor was shot
dead.”
A company of the East Yorkshires was on the
estate and he had five bodyguards night and day.
Even so, insurgents would at times fire bullets
through his house roof of an evening.
He was friendly with the Malay and Chinese
workers and he says they saved his life by warning
him if there was danger. Also, on the two occasions
when he bumped into insurgents, he shot first.
The first time, he was out pig-shooting with a
Gurkha colonel on an abandoned Chinese-owned
estate. Three Gurkhas had the task of driving the
pigs out of the undergrowth. When he went to help,
he found himself facing a fourth man who, he
suddenly realised, was a terrorist. He fired. The
man jumped behind a tree and escaped. “We captured
a fairly large bandit camp with guns and food and
had a monumental celebration party in the Gurkha
mess.”
Before retiring last year as chairman of
Unilever Plantations, Leslie Davidson got a green
charter accepted by the Tropical Growers’
Association. The charter undertakes, among other
things, that growers will plant only on secondary
forest, scrub or swampy land and not fell virgin
forest. They will not disturb local lifestyles or
destroy water courses.
Leslie Davidson was responsible for a Unilever
venture into Colombia which has transformed poor
grassland into an irrigated plantation. He is
chairman of the advisory board of the newly
established International Centre for Plantation
Studies, at Silsoe College, near Bedford. He lives
near Brighten “in a cowshed that has been converted
rather well.”
“My Malaysian friends can’t believe I live in a
cowshed,” he says. “But at least it’s not likely to
be washed down the river in a flood.”
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