DEREK LUCKING was no longer the managing director in Pamol Cameroon as he had retired.
He and Maria Lucking had lived on the plantation for decades.
Rising from field assistant to managing director, he did his job well despite the problems that would arise.
Although the place was in the Anglophone area of Cameroon, he could speak French and he would go to meet the officials in the capital Yaounde and negotiate on the prices that the government would want for palm oil and kernel produced in the country.
Those prices were set low enough to please the officials, but the costs of production were high.
Cameroon was not a big centre of profit for Unilever.
On the other hand, when Derek was there his biggest role had been to pave the way for the entomologist Dr Rahman Anwar Syed to enter and conduct a study on the pollinating insect paid for by plantation companies in Sabah and Sarawak, based on an idea from Leslie Davidson.
During his young days in the plantations in Cameroon, Leslie had chanced to observe that the insects were resting on the male flower or flying among female flowers.
Rahman Anwar, who was from the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, proved the Elaeidobius insects were feeding on the pollen of male flowers and flying to the female flowers in search of more food.
The female flowers released the same aniseed smell of pollen that would attract the insects.
With their bodies covered in pollen, the grains would stick to the receptive female flowers.
The natural pollination would produce full bunches with big fruitlets.
With Malaysian government approval, the insects were imported and released in Pamol in 1981, and pollination was solved when oil palm was manually pollinated.
The work stopped, the pollen stores were closed and workers went to other jobs.
The insects took over their roles and the yield increases are on record.
Now when I visited again four years later, Derek and Maria were replaced by Barry Mack and Brenda.
Barry was not a planter but he had been a successful head of the trading arm of the plantations group called Tropical Products Sales or TPS, based in Brussels.
He travelled to marketing conferences around the world. He was a most interesting person. He loved to talk.
I had visited him once and before his team, he would give his view on the market and where prices would be heading.
But here I saw he was not in his element. He lived alone as Brenda had returned to England with a sprained wrist, and now when I arrived at his big bungalow I saw him sick in bed, finding it hard to get up.
I stayed with the plantations director, Frank Fyfe, a Scotsman who had previously worked in Sime Darby and, like many other expatriates from Malaysia, had spent more time in plantations than I had.
He was a big figure who would glare at you when he made a point and I had heard that he was regarded as a hairy planter, who would shout and jump into action before using his head.
But upon staying with him and having discussions over a few days, I found he had thought deeply about the way plantations would be managed.
I saw that he was also good with machines.
He had a passion for keeping an old rubber factory going, which made brown crepe sold to make soles for shoes.
He showed me an old Ruston engine at the back and under his care it seemed to run forever.
Frank was the latest of many planters who had been there and apart from Leslie, another planter Joe Walton had also served there as a young man, growing bananas at the time.
He had often told the stories of working into the night to get the bunches onto ships for Europe.
Moray Graham was another planter who later came to Pamol Sabah and then joined a plantation across Labuk.
He was a friend of Rahman Anwar and in Sabah, he had helped as a sounding board in the quiet evenings upriver.
Garven Thorniley, my predecessor in Sabah, was another planter who had worked in Cameroon.
So, apart from getting the help of pollinating insects, the industry had also gained from Cameroon by having many planters trained there and then coming to Malaysia to give the benefit of their experience.
Ted Hellen was a person who had travelled the other way.
He was the mill engineer in Kluang when I was a young planter.
Now having come out of retirement, he was here advising the mill.
We went through the figures on the trend of oil and kernel losses during processing.
But we found the problem was in the field.
The well-developed bunches would give the most oil if they were harvested only when they were ripe and when all the loose fruits reached the mill.
We needed all the oil and kernel we could get.
The yield of oil palm was low with bunches at 10 tonnes per hectare on average, about half that in Malaysia, mainly due to several months of dry season, followed by very wet days when work would stop.
Some palms could get a disease that causes the leaves to wilt.
Leaf miners could eat into the fronds and leave them dry.
Those were some of the problems.
I also visited an even more remote estate called Ndian and the best approach was by boat, which I enjoyed. The problems were the same.
My next destination was Pamol Nigeria. I had a ticket to fly from Douala to the Nigerian town of Calabar, across the border.
During the visit to Cameroon, I did not see much of Barry.
He was for the most part sick in bed and not talkative as before.
I wasn’t aware at the time, but he was trying to decide whether or not to remain in his position.
The writer has extensive experience in the management of
