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Kota Kinabalu: Budget 2021 pushes the plantation industry to reduce heavy reliance on foreign labour and to hire local workers to replace them.

If that is not feasible in the short term, the budget provides RM30 million for mechanisation and automation.

Foreign labourers are hired by plantations to tend, fertilise and harvest oil palm fruits. Ironically, it takes the urgency of curbing Covid-19 infection risk involving the transient population of foreign migrants to stiffen the resolve of the federal government to act, control, document properly and deport jobless foreign workers.