BE shocked. Last year, Malaysia, a nation once known for its agriculture sector, spent RM63 billion importing food. Even the easy-to-grow cabbages are being imported. This isn't a one-off story.
Our food import bill has been averaging RM55 billion for several years.
What ails Malaysia's agriculture sector? Well, a few things. Consider just three.
Firstly, neglect. Some time since the First Malaysia Plan, agriculture lost its darling status as administration after administration started wooing "industrialised" nation status.
The logic then was that a strong manufacturing sector would take us there in half the time. It is flawed logic such as this — no less hawked by the big business-friendly agenda of the World Bank — that has reduced the agriculture sector's contribution to our gross domestic product to a miniscule 7.4 per cent.
Secondly, not enough land is being devoted to growing food. As the numbers stand, only a mere million hectares are available for food production. Oil palm and rubber trees do better. Together, the two cash crops grow on seven million hectares.
Seven million versus one million is a large skew. If we want to be food secure, we must do better. Not that we do not have enough land. We do. Take, for example, the more than 300 hectares of abandoned land owned by the Agriculture and Food Industries Ministry, the Federal Land Development Authority, Felcra and the Rubber Industry Smallholder Development Authority that the government intends to use to grow food in the 2023 Budget.
There must be many more hectares such as these around the country that are being wasted. A national register of unused and abandoned land will be a good place to start.
Finally, the authorities tend to favour big companies over smallholders, despite the latter being more numerous. For some strange reasons, they have overlooked the fact that more than 90 per cent of our fruit and vegetable farms are operated by smallholders.
The story is the same for rubber and cocoa holdings, though not for oil palm. So it's a wonder why huge parcels of land in every development corridor in the country are the big companies' to take, while the smallholders have to make do with tiny parcels and short leases.
Smallholders need institutional and policy support. Not just the big companies. A government that is serious about food security will make sure smallholders get both.
Poverty doesn't get reduced by just favouring big corporations. Neither does food production get secured. Big doesn't necessarily mean good for the country.
The 2023 Budget appears to want to make amends for our old flaw.
More than RM20 billion is being set aside to make Malaysia self-sufficient in food. The RM1 billion Bank Negara Malaysia Agrifood Financing Scheme is one. The RM10 billion government allocation to support small- and medium-sized enterprises in the agrifood and tourism industries is the other.
But for agriculture, especially food production, to be the
new darling again, it will require a more comprehensive reimagining than this. Reforming in fits and starts can only take us so far.