We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2024
INTRODUCTION
Rice holds a special place in the socio-economic and political lives of Malaysians. It is a staple for almost the whole population and the first item in their food pyramid. Hence, rice is considered the major item in the “basket of food” for the country's food security. The paddy community is an important pool for political votes but more than 90 per cent of paddy farmers are in the bottom 40 per cent income bracket (Davidson 2018; MoA 2019b).
The sector only accounted for about 0.7 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1980, and was slashed in half by 2017 (Serin 2017). Its share of the agricultural GDP declined even faster, from 4.7 per cent in 1980 to 0.16 per cent in 2010. Paddy area accounted for about 20.5 per cent of agricultural land in 1970 but just 9.9 per cent in 2017 (MPIC 2018). The number of paddy farmers has declined from 208,000 in 1985 (MoA 2011) to 192,663 in 2019. Paddy farms are mainly smallholders with an average size recorded at 1.2 hectares (ha) in 1970 and 2.0 ha in 2016 (Selvadurai 1978; MoA 2016a). After the Green Revolution and purposive development support, absolute poverty among paddy farmers declined sharply from 88.1 per cent in 1970 to 48.3 per cent in 1990 and by 2015 the figure was significantly low. However, the incidence of relative poverty among paddy farmers is still the highest in the agricultural sectors.
While abject poverty has been greatly reduced, the sector shows slow growth in terms of its ability to meet local consumption and limited value-added development (Mohamed Arshad et al. 2019a, 2019b). The self-sufficiency levels (SSL) which are proxies for food availability have remained in the range of 65 per cent to 75 per cent in the last four decades. The SSL dropped from 70 per cent in 2016 to 63 per cent in 2019 despite a quadruple increase in subsidy allocation and government expenditure on the sector accounting for about half of the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture and Agro-based Industry (MoA) for the period of 2015–17 (Ismail 2017).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
