Agrocloud and Malaysian Cocoa Board (MCB) have inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate and assist Malaysian cocoa smallholders, in the recently held Expo Dubai 2020 in United Arab Emirates (UAE). The goal of the partnership is to see Malaysian cocoa smallholders utilise the latest available technology to improve their efficiency and productivity in hopes of translating it to better earnings from the crop.
Agrocloud, a subsidiary of Key Alliance Group listed in Bursa Malaysia, through its exclusive partnership with Austrian agritech leader Pessl Instruments, are extending their technology to support smallholders that are planting cocoa after initial successful test run with rice smallholders in Malaysia. The technology, deployed in certain rice farms in Malaysia, has seen promising results, thus deploying in cocoa farms can provide better datasets, in a holistic approach to deliver a system that solves crop monitoring in Malaysia.
Managing director of Agrocloud, Marcus Hon says that the company has lined it goals like MCB’s. Other than increasing the productivity and income of smallholders, Marcus believes that traceability and sustainability are key information that consumers look for as assurance that the cocoa product they are consuming are of the highest quality, ethically produced and environmentally sustainable.
“Our precision agriculture advisory tools in place today for paddy smallholders are working well. Thus, we have extended the technology to other crops, in this case for cocoa. Smallholders in general do not have centralised data management system to monitor the growth process of their produce. Hence, we are partnering MCB to develop a Cocoa Information Management System (CIMS) so that cocoa plantation can be managed similar to an airline managing its fleet,” Marcus added.
Marcus continued to say that the CIMS is not only for small smallholders, but large plantation smallholders can also benefit from the technology to fully digitalise their operations. Agrocloud is in talks with a major cocoa company in Malaysia to adopt the CIMS to its operations.
In Dubai, MoU documents were exchanged between MCB’s Director-General Dr. Ramle Hj Kasin and Agrocloud Sdn Bhd Managing director Marcus Hon during the launch of the Sustainable Agricommodities (Food Agricommodities) week.
Witnessing the exchange were Deputy Minister of Plantation Industries & Commodities Malaysia Datuk Willie Mongin, Austrian Trade Commissioner to the UAE Mr. Richard Bandera and Ambassador of Malaysia to the UAE His Excellency Dato' Mohd Tarid Sufian.
Agrocloud Sdn Bhd
3 March 2022
