This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 4, 2023 - December 10, 2023
After the pandemic-climatic-war shock, the grounds for agriculture shifted dramatically. The landscape of agriculture is mired with complexity unnoticed before. The supply and demand models are no longer the way they used to be — the system of equations with predetermined variables which is oblivious of the web of complexity that emerged lately may have to change.
The new grounds are characterised by the interconnectedness of things, multi-dimensional factoring, the existence of feedback loops, and the presence of multi-subsystems. For instance, the understanding of a sector’s performance would be flawed without the inclusion of climate, natural resources, disruptive technology, probable pandemics in the future and shocks that vibrate the system. With these parameters, the sector is in need of a new mission, away from the conventional mantra of profit for growth which excludes some of these determinants.
The United Nations and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have had the foresight to realise this development. Under the Food Systems Summit (2021), the UN launched the food systems approach to address food security with the following objectives: sustainability, resiliency and equity. This new paradigm is deemed necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals to meet the challenges of poverty, food security, malnutrition, population growth, climate change and natural resource degradation.
Those semantics are certainly loaded, but they are necessary for the future. How do these developments affect Malaysia’s agriculture and food?
The answer lies in the present and their implications on the future through the lens of food systems and its objective functions of sustainability as proposed by the UN and FAO. Continuing business as usual may produce similar outcomes, if not worse.
The current scenario of Malaysia’s food is the product of past policies laid out by our former colonial master, which emphasised industrial raw materials such as tin, rubber, cocoa and oil palm for their industrial development. These were extractive activities, with minimal replenishment and restoration to the soil, and other environmental damage due to deep mining, overuse of chemical fertiliser and the practice of mono-cropping. It was also claimed that these crops caused large losses of biodiversity and wild animals. However, the biggest oversight was the marginalisation of the food sector as resources (land, labour and capital) were devoted to the said commodities. By 2020, close to 85% of the agricultural land was planted with oil palm and rubber, and only 11% was planted with food commodities.
Due to limited institutional support, the food sector is behind on all fronts such as yield, value-add and competitiveness relative to neighbouring countries. With the exception of poultry meat and eggs, all food items such as beef, rice, fisheries, vegetables and fruit could not meet local consumption. The self-sufficiency levels of all these commodities have declined since the 1990s. The sector is plagued with unsustainable issues, such as high incidence of post-harvest losses and food waste, depletion of soil and water quality, and high usage of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. The economic issues are glaring — low yield, limited innovation and the high cost of production. The latter was worsened by total dependence on imported inputs and inflationary effects of the pandemic crisis.
Each of the three industrial crops has shown a unique behavioural archetype over time. For instance, oil palm, after a linear steady growth may reach its ceiling limit soon at 6.5 million hectares, while rubber area is decaying slowly, and cocoa exhibits the overshoot and collapse archetype. No new golden crop has been discovered thus far to replace them.
Despite the success of these industrial crops, the country failed to weather the pandemic shocks in 2020-2022. During such a crisis, plenty of food is needed to ensure food security of the people and not oil palm or rubber. It is clear then that the current crop mix is not crisis-proof. For instance, the failure to address the recent rice crisis manifests serious structural defects in the sector. These include production that has not kept up with consumption. Worst of all, the increase in the prices of imported rice caused rice hoarding, arbitraging and adulteration to take advantage of the price differences. This happened despite the staunch 50-year-old protectionist policy on the sector. For a while, cheap local rice was unavailable in the market. The government had to intervene to normalise the situation. This fiasco exposes the failure of the protectionist policy in times of uncertainty.
Malaysia may not be able to reverse the crop mix even in the medium term. But she may be able to add value to the commodities, raw or processed, through sustainable practices in production and marketing. This is beyond value proposition, but to produce brand new agricultural commodities and food that are sustainable, economically and environmentally. In short, creating a new direction for the sector. For this, Malaysia has to turn to science and technology to create climate-smart and technology-smart agriculture. Size is not a hindrance as advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), drones and e-business applications are neutral to size.
The above proposition is not new, but the doing and branding are. Malaysia may emulate the success of both climate- and technology-smart agriculture, as proven by countries such as Cuba, Israel, the Netherlands and China. These countries have not only adopted the approach but have sold the technologies to other countries. Israel’s drip technology is being used in some African countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia and Dubai with great success.
Malaysia has laid out world class research and development (R&D) infrastructure for oil palm and rubber since the 1960s. It need not start from zero. It requires a little tweaking or adjustment towards environmentally friendly technologies for their products and processes. The market for sustainable technologies for these crops is wide — covering the major oil palm and rubber producers of the world. For cocoa produce, ensuring that the crop is grown under a shady tree and close to nature needs to be continued with the support of IoT, drones and sensors to monitor the farms.
Similarly, the R&D infrastructure for food commodities is well established except that it requires a big overhaul to move away from the traditional ways of doing things, towards sustainable technologies and practices from all angles. For that, the country has to relook at the R&D ecosystem to minimise duplication between institutions and, most of all, to be mission-oriented towards producing climate- and technology-smart agriculture. The traditional ways of doing research for ranking purposes do not jive with these ultimata as it is digressive and extractive of the local research funds with minimal return to the industry. Malaysia ranks No 2 in Asean in terms of the number of scientists per one million population (2,052 in 2014) compared with the Philippines (189), Thailand (174) and Vietnam (114). With the right mission and support, Malaysia has the potential to be the leader in sustainable technologies for selected industrial and food crops in the region.
Prof Dr Fatimah Mohamed Arshad is a Fellow of the Laboratory of Agricultural and Food Policy Studies at Universiti Putra Malaysia and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS) in Kuala Lumpur
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