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).