Just too much to swallow

Instead of continuing to rely on costly imported food, M’sia should move towards high-tech farming methods and engaging the youth to embrace agriculture.

IT is a shame, really. No other country blessed with so much sunshine, rain and vast areas of fertile land spends such astronomical sums on imported food.

Malaysia’s agricultural product imports amounted to a whopping RM77bil last year, an enormous bill, given its population of 32 million. The imports included processed food valued at RM20bil.

Among the other major contributors to the rising bill are fruits and vegetables (for which we paid RM8.5bil in 2018), dairy products (RM5bil), fish (RM4.5bil), beef (RM2.25bil), processed fruits and nuts (RM1.67bil), wheat and flour (RM1.42bil), potatoes (RM597.9mil) and pork (RM297mil).

The country is very much dependent on China, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, South Africa and the US for many of these imports.

We also spend RM1.4bil to buy our staple sustenance of rice, mostly from Thailand, because the country’s 300,000 padi farmers can only produce 70% of the demand.

Aside from the weakening ringgit, this over-reliance on foreign sources of food makes the country more susceptible to price hikes, which can lead to higher costs for consumers and inflation.

For far too long, there has been an overwhelming focus on the plantation sector at the expense of food production.

The plantation sector, of course, is doing rather well with exports totalling RM80bil last year. But there is a stark disparity in land usage between plantations and farms.

Malaysia has only about eight million hectares of agricultural land but six million hectares are already planted with oil palm while rubber takes up another 1.2 million hectares.

Vegetables and fruit farmers, livestock breeders and those involved in aquaculture occupy 600,000 acres or around 8% of the agricultural land.

Against this contrasting backdrop, a lot of agricultural land is left idle across the country.Five years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported a total of 119,273ha of idle land, with 117,198ha in the peninsula, mostly in Pahang, Johor, Perak, Terengganu and Negri Sembilan. These include Malay reserve land, Malay customary land, Malay land holdings and wakaf (endowment) land.

The number of people involved in food production is also small – only 1.8 million out of the 15 million employed Malaysians.

Most of them struggle with low crop yields because of unpredictable weather conditions, inefficient farming methods and pest infestations. Given the uncertain economic conditions faced by the country and the soaring cost of imports, food production should be the ideal industry sector for the government to focus on today.

But before that, Malaysia has to dramatically shake up the sector by adapting smart farming or precision agriculture.

Precision agriculture involves the optimum use of information and factors such as weather patterns, soil conditions, temperature, humidity, water, fertilisers, pesticides and respond to them effectively to reduce costs and wastage and maximise yields and income.Instead of depending on physical human labour and monitoring, precision agriculture relies on artificial intelligence, satellites, drones and integrated weather forecasting systems.

This is the future of agriculture and Malaysia does not have the luxury of time to delay its implementation.

This is also a potential area where the high number of unemployed youths in the country – estimated at 60% of the 504,000 jobless people – can be channelled into.

Because of the huge mismatch between the knowledge and skills of today’s graduates with the demands of the country’s workforce, the number of unemployed graduates has been steadily rising. As at last year, there were 204,000 graduates, or 9.6% of the unemployed.

With the right training, these unemployed graduates could be enticed to join the technological revolution of the agriculture sector and become agro entrepreneurs.

It has been 35 years since Malaysia’s first National Agriculture Policy (NAP) was drafted. It covered the period between 1984 and 1991. Then, came NAP2 (1992-1997) and NAP3 (1998-2010).

The NAP was replaced by the National Agro-Food Policy (2011-2020) which is aimed at transforming the agriculture sector to ensure adequate food supply and food safety, developing the agro-food industry to be competitive and sustainable and increasing the income levels of agro entrepreneurs and farmers

Among its areas of focus are food security, developing high-value agriculture, sustainable growth, dynamic agricultural clusters to maximise income generation, private sector-driven investments in modern agriculture, knowledge and information-based human capital and modernisation through research and development and innovation.

In February, Agriculture and Agro-based Industry Minister Datuk Salahuddin Ayub unveiled yet another plan towards food security, rural economic development, domestic investment and international trade, to free farmers, fishermen and livestock breeders from the shackles of poverty.

He said the ministry would use 18 strategies and 51 initiatives to ensure the agricultural industry becomes even more competitive.Similar promises have been recurrent in plans and policies over the past three decades but what’s the reality? We are still spending billions on imported food.

Perhaps we need to “go Dutch” for expertise. The Netherlands, a country with 17 million people and a land mass of 41,543sq km, compared with Malaysia’s 330,803sq km, is the world’s second largest exporter of food.

The No.1 exporter is the US, which has a land mass that is 270 times bigger.

Although the Dutch population is concentrated in a small, low-lying delta region where land is expensive, farms employing precision agriculture technologies have become the most intensive, sustainable and efficient in the world.

The country’s Wageningen University & Research, known for is groundbreaking agricultural research and innovation, has been voted the top agricultural university in the world for the third time in a row.

Dutch agriculture has maintained its lead over international competitors by continually investing in the renewal of agricultural production.

We can start carving this path by engaging with our youth.

Media consultant M. Veera Pandiyan likes this quote by John F. Kennedy: The farmer is the only man in the economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways. The views expressed here are entirely the columnist’s own.