Agriculture and the Malaysian Economy (Chapter 8)

Crop Diversification

Driving forces for crop diversification
- Increasing income on small farm holdings
- Withstanding price fluctuation
- Mitigating effects of increasing climate variability
- Balancing food demand
- Improving fodder for livestock animals
- Conservation of natural resources
- Minimising environmental pollution
- Reducing dependence on off-farm inputs
- Depending on crop rotation, decreasing insect pests, diseases and weed problems
- Increasing community food security


Challenges
- Reduce labour requirements in agriculture
- Maximize land utilization
- Strengthen the competitiveness of Malaysian agriculture
- Enhance private sector investment in food production
- Smallholders need to be transformed into a more commercial sector
- Innovative and efficient agricultural practices

National Agrofood Policy 2011-20120

Objective

- To address food security and safety to ensure availability, affordability dan accessability

- To ensure the competitiveness and sustainability of the agrofood industry

- To increase the income level of agropreneurs

National Commodity Policy (2011-2020) 

Objective

- To increase the contribution of plantation industrial commodities to the nation's economy

- To modernise and transform the commodity industry towards a more competitive and sustainable level

- To encourage the development of the commodity industry along the value chain

- To increase the income of operators and smallholders in the commodity industry

- To promote Malaysia as the centre of excellence in R&D, technology development and the downstream processing of industrial commodities

Programmes implemented to ensure the availability, accessibility and affordability of food

- Increasing food production through optimisation and sustainable land use including integrated farming, intensive farming and mini estate paddy farming in granary areas

- Maintaining rice stockpile at 292,000 metric tonnes to sustain consumption for 45 days

- Upgrading agriculture infrastructure to increase food productivity especially in the concentrated area for food production such as the Permanent Food Production Park (TKPM), Aquaculture Industrial Zone (ZIA) and Targeted Area Concentration for Livestock (TAC)

- Securing long-term contract agreements to import rice with matching agreements to export palm oil or oil

- Increasing the quality and safety of food by expanding the compliance to good agriculture practice (GAP), good manufacturing practice (GMP), Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS), halal accreditation to more farms as well as increasing the quality of food packaging, labelling and branding