RELEVANCE OF FERMENTATION TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOPS IN MALAYSIA

If I am not mistaken there are at least three public universities in this country regularly advertising or carrying out fermentation technology workshops. The syllabus of the fermentation technology workshops carried out by these universities are about the same .
I often wonder the purpose and the target groups to which these workshops are intended. The subject of fermentation technology is more geared towards the high end users or industries ( of which we have almost none). These fermentation technology workshops are geared especially for those that can afford the huge capital costs equipments or for those doing teaching and research in the academia. Therefore will such workshops be economically viable?
In Malaysia, our type of fermentation industries is not that competitive with such advanced nations that do require the use of such sophisticated outlay of equipments. Maybe to be more relevant we only need ONE training centre for such workshops. In our case in my personal views we simply have too many pilot plants in fermentation technology that it is no longer economically viable for too many workshops.
What we need perhaps are more in adapting the existing fermentation technology applications and principles to suit our local industries of which we have our specific niches. It does not help our local cottage fermentation industries to learn, operate or even own such advanced fermentation technology equipment. It simply doesn’t make sense! What our industries need are simple construction of self made fermentors or sterilizers. Our industries need to learn more about the importance of optimizing,controlling contamination and improving aseptic techniques
What we need is how to transfer the principles of fermentation technology to the traditional industries where they can understand or improve their production without having to invest in costly fermentors. As it is our industries are already saturated with various kinds of labels such as MSC status, Bionexus, QC, HACCP etc etc but with nothing much really happening.
Let us have a paradigm shift and instead conduct fermentation technology workshops which are more relevant to the traditional fermentation industries. Teach the operators and improve their processes and not be isolated in the empty pilot scale fermentation plants!



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