Sime Darby has recently declared itself as ‘the first in the world to completely sequence, assemble and annotate the oil palm genome'.

Technologically speaking, the key agricultural milestone in this breakthrough lies in being able to increase productivity and enhance sustainability of this commercially important plant.

Sime Darby can now 'come up with 'super palms'that can produce more than 10 tonnes of oil palm per hectre in a year' (currently only five tonnes).

This breakthrough has many positive implications.Coming at a time of the most serious global structural economic downturn in decades,it certainly throws up new options and alternatives that were hitherto unavailable.

Although Sime Darby states that it will take some time for these 'super palms' to come into production, companies can now start undertaking preparatory 'downsteam' and ‘upstream' research.

This should be aimed at decreasing dependence on high-tech western export markets in anticipation of the increased yields and diversification of oil palm products and other commercially important plants as well.

For instance, in Malaysia, where 90% of all manufacturing activities are undertaken by SMEs, it is estimated that only 10% of this contribution goes toward the GDP.

This 'leakage' needs to be reversed, so that manufacturing becomes an integral part of the domestic economy, as it should be.

In fact, Temasek Holdings (Singapore) has already taken steps to reduce its exposure to Western nations by ‘giving greater importance to Asia and (keeping) and eye out for new (world) opportunities'.

There is also a seldom realised benefit that would arise in the protection of the environment through decreasing de-forestation.

Indeed, this dimension needs to be highlighted because it is now increasingly realised that rain forests are being rapidly depleted for new oil palm cultivation because of low yields especially due to poor and inefficient management of existing plantations.

In other words, instead of increasing the productivity of existing plantations through proper management, the same objective is being achieved by deforestation, and destroying the environment with the acompanying negative impact on climate change.

The expected 'super palms' will certainly address and hopefully overcome this problem as well.