IS THERE SUCH THINGS AS ‘MALAYSIAN FERMENTATION INDUSTRIES ‘?

This is the question that has often come to the minds of many Malaysians. And many have been convinced that there are indigenous fermented foods which seem to be their propriety rights! The truth is fermentation process has always been universal where almost every country in the world has their own unique fermentation products to be proud of.
The truth is each country has its own local names in their own language to identify the fermentation products. That does not mean that they have their own ‘copyrights’ over the fermentation products.
It is sad that in one of the states in Malaysia, the people even claimed that the fish sauce or ‘budu’ is their own unique fermented food! If only these believers take the trouble to research or even google that the fish sauce is produced in many countries especially where they have rich resource of fish. The believers are simply too blinded and obsessed with the belief that the fermented fish sauce is their own discovery.
It can be seen that the issue here is not about fermentation but more about semantics
Analyses of the various fermentation industries in Malaysia we could categorise them in the following groups:
1 Traditional fermentation which are often fermentation industries carried out from generation to generation and are often at the scale of cottage industries
2 Large industrial fermentations characterized by high volume low value products such as alcoholic beverages manufactured by giant brewers from the west as foreign investments
3 Limited pharmaceutical fermentations carried under license of giant pharmaceutical companies
4 Medium fermentation industries producing soy sauce, yeasts and the like
The local universities here are still bogged down in the quagmire of doing ‘Mickey mouse’ level of fermentation such as laboratory scale research and isolating strains of potential microorganisms. How many of these works will end up profitably as successful fermentation projects is for us to all wait and see



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