Making the middlemen the bogeymen

THE Agriculture and Agro-Based Industry Ministry has been at war for over a year now. The commerce-oriented “Agriculture is Business” motto has been dropped. Instead, a number of the Ministry’s most visible initiatives today are part of its “Jihad Memerangi Orang Tengah” (Jihad Against the Middlemen) campaign.

The first shot was fired in September 2013, when the Minister, Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob, declared that the Ministry would devote the following year to eliminating the role of the middlemen in the agriculture sector.