Conservation is a business model
Forty minutes on BFM 89.9 about who should benefit from Sarawak's food knowledge, and how.
In September I joined Elaine Boey on BFM 89.9's Enterprise Explores for a conversation called Conserving and Profiting: Sarawak's Food Heritage. Her question was a business question, and a fair one: if indigenous plant knowledge can be commercially valuable, who should lead the work, and how do we get it right? These are the points I would stand behind, in the order we reached them.
For fourteen years I worked at applying French technique to Malaysian ingredients. Somewhere along the way I noticed that the ingredients I was cooking had knowledge behind them that nobody was writing down: the recipes, how each one is used, when it is harvested. It passes from one mouth to the next. Lose one generation and it is gone.
I closed six restaurants at their peak to work on this instead. Much of that decision was conviction, and I could not justify it with numbers at the time. A couple of years in, it has held up better as a business case than I expected. You cannot sell what you have not documented, and you cannot protect what has no market value. Conservation and commerce end up needing each other.
Preservation is the museum model. You freeze the thing so it cannot change. It survives, and it stops earning. Conservation keeps it in use: the crop stays in the ground, the technique stays in someone’s hands, and the people who keep it are paid for it, now and for the generation after them.
For a business audience, the short version is this. Preservation is a cost centre. Conservation is a business model. A sourcing or CSR programme that pays for documentation with no money flowing back to the source is a grant, and grants run out. I have made that mistake myself.
Ask someone to protect a resource that earns them nothing, while a neighbour who does not bother earns more from the harvest, and you are asking for charity for ever. It does not hold. Where I have seen it work, the market pays a premium for provenance and quality rather than for volume. Coffee shows how: once buyers learned about single origins and varieties, the farmers who kept the old husbandry gained a quality, and a name, that could command a better price.
Pepper could go the same way. In the general market it is sorted and priced by size. Grade it as coffee is graded, by plot and by taste, and two hills side by side can give you one pepper that is fruitier and one that is earthier. That difference belongs to the place, and nobody can take it away.
Elaine asked the question I most want people to push me on: I am not Sarawakian, so what is in it for the communities? I do not like the word founder. I would rather be seen as a custodian. Everything I have learned came from the communities. I did not discover it and I did not make it up. Serumpun Sarawak is a platform for them to show what is already theirs, and the knowledge and the produce stay attributed to the communities they come from.
That is also why the mentee programme matters. Talented Sarawakians from across the food and beverage trade went through a rigorous selection, and three staged with me. They learned to procure, to handle the logistics of Osaka, and to develop menus to a consistent standard with ChefPro, the system I co-founded and of which I am the main architect. At the Kuching Finale they wrote the whole menu and ran the dinner at Sarawak Cultural Village, and I was there only in support. One of them went on to win in competition during the year, and the state and their own communities have begun to recognise them. They cooked as proud Bidayuh and proud Iban, with the ingredients and techniques of their own people.
Not everything can travel. Fresh produce from deep in the interior will not survive the journey, so the first candidates are high-value ingredients that keep. I talked about a native litsea that could stand beside Sichuan pepper, about Kelulut honey, about tampoi and tuak, fermentation at its most natural, and about Engkabang, the illipe nut that once kept families going on rice and butter alone. It nearly disappeared. Demand for the empurau, a river fish that feeds on fallen Engkabang, is one reason people are planting it again.
I would rather set them out than sell a growth story with no friction in it. Supply is seasonal and comes from smallholders, so it cannot promise plantation volumes. Export paperwork, phytosanitary certificates and traceability mostly do not exist yet at village level, and building them is slow, unglamorous work. Logistics from the interior are hard. Biopiracy is a real risk: there is already plenty of pretend Musang King for sale abroad. I am glad that Sarawak upholds the Nagoya Protocol, so that whatever comes from a community is attributed back to it.
The state is already doing a great deal, through bodies such as its biodiversity centre, to establish what is endemic. What is still missing is work on the food culture itself, and on how it can be commercialised inside a protected framework, with conservation in mind and a way of measuring the economics. That is a project I am working on now, with world-leading experts, and it will be announced soon.
None of these is my invention. A geographical indication, as Kampot pepper shows in Cambodia. Traceability, because without it you cannot certify anything. Grading that rewards the top of the harvest, so the best pepper stops subsidising the average. And processing at origin, drying, milling and packing ideally in a community-owned facility, so that the value stays where the crop was grown.
I am still building this myself, so take it as a working list:
- Get the consent of the community, or its traditional authority, before you commercialise anything of theirs.
- Put the benefit-sharing in writing: a fixed percentage, or a price floor above market, so a bad season does not ruin the grower.
- Name the origin in public. It costs little and it is easy to skip. New Zealand and its Māori communities have shown how much pride and value that can carry.
- Put some of the margin back into local capacity: training, infrastructure, help with certification.
- Respect the sustainable harvest. The land needs time to recover, and people are not machines.
- Treat it as a relationship of many years, not a single purchase order.
That last point is what keeps the produce extraordinary: it protects the integrity of the people and of the land.
Elaine’s last question was what I would like to see. We are working with education institutions: with my own university, Taylor’s, where I am Adjunct Professor, and with universities abroad, including Toulouse, a leading authority on the sociology of gastronomy and food culture. Together we are close to proposing a centre of excellence for research into, and the conservation of, Sarawak’s indigenous gastronomy.
It would cover more than biodiversity: the practices, the history, and how that knowledge can shape policy, frameworks and support for commercialisation. Above all it would educate the next generation, and show them that higher education is not only commerce, economics and medicine. Heritage and culture are powerful too, and they can set you apart from everyone else in the world.
It is my small way of giving something back to the people of Sarawak, who embraced me and let me represent them. In the long run I hope the platform, and the education built around it, can be shared with other countries that have large indigenous communities of their own.
Preservation is a cost centre. Conservation is a business model.
James Won, on BFM 89.9
Name the people the knowledge came from, and make sure the value finds its way back to them.