ConnexionOPINION

Connexion: Catch the new global trend and dig the soil for riches

By Joachim Ng

On this first day of Year 2025, Perakians had better rush to catch the new global trend before the field gets overcrowded. What should be your New Year’s resolution? Is it Go Bitcoin? No, it’s Go Rural! One headmistress of a school in Rapat Setia next to Gunung Rapat and near the Ipoh airport has reaped the harvest in good time.

Nor Hizan Abd Jalil of SK Rapat Setia initiated a padi cultivation project on school grounds in June 2023. By November 2023 she had the EcoRice SKRS project launched as the first padi cultivation project within an urban school in Malaysia.

With funding by the Perak State Agricultural Development Corporation, the teachers and students boxed up 15 padi planting zones that produced a total of 15 kg of padi for the first harvest. Not only did the project instill in students an interest in agriculture, it gave them an opportunity to enhance their vocational skills and generate significant ideas.

This is vitally important for Perak’s economic growth in 2025 because agriculture is the new global trend with a significant shift towards sustainable farming practices like precision agriculture, regenerative farming, and vertical farming to address climate change and resource scarcity.

Smart farming with use of technologies such as AI, IoT (Internet of Things), drones, and sensors are revolutionising agriculture, improving efficiency and yields, thereby halving the land holding sizes required.

Smart farming is particularly growing in countries like the US, China, India, and Mongolia as these countries lead a global back-to-the-land trend where the goats and a better healthier life awaits. University graduates in Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are also entering various fields in the farming sector.

China has prioritised rural vitalisation to increase farm incomes and spur a reverse urban-rural migration. Its rural areas are being transformed into wealth-creation communities with emphasis on making agriculture thrive, the rural environment beautiful, and farmers’ pockets full.

With a global population of 8.25 billion, there is increasing pressure on the agriculture sector to produce more food sustainably to ensure food security. Agricultural technology has become a booming sector, with innovations attracting billions in investments globally. Areas like vertical farming, hydroponics, bioengineering, and lab-grown food are gaining traction.

Consumer demand for organic produce to safeguard health is also rising in many countries, and this is bringing a fall in prices making such produce more affordable. Extreme weather events that disrupt farming have also spurred new practices such as the planting of drought-resistant crops, use of water-efficient irrigation, and climate-smart strategies.

But where is Malaysia? At last count, only 15% of the under-40s are curious about farming. This is a pitifully low figure compared to let’s say Japan where almost all elementary school pupils get their hands soiled in vegetable farming. In a field where we ought to be the leader, we get left behind.

Only 10% of Malaysia’s workforce is deployed in the agricultural sector and nearly a quarter of farmers earn less than RM600 a month.

Politics has everything to do with the continuing rural backwardness in Malaysia. We have a long tradition of agriculture and yet we are deliberately skipping a world trend, as this allows race-based politicians to keep chiming the meme that urban folks are rich and rural folks are poor.

Does the Government want Malaysia to be left behind? With politicians ardently singing a song of rural poverty to keep farmers utterly dependent, miserably few graduates want to be seen working a field. Youngsters in most states have deserted their farming and fishing heritage, taking to the cities instead.

Three structural problems need to be overcome. From pre-Merdeka days, commodities such as rubber and oil palm have taken priority over crops with 80% of total agro lands occupied by plantations. It’s time to strike a balance.

The second structural issue is that the supply of fertilisers is dominated by a monopoly, leaving no room for other suppliers to offer competitive prices.

The third disincentive is that middlemen distributors enjoy a bigger profit margin than vegetable farmers who usually get only 10% of the market retail prices.

Our politicians remain blissfully unaware of a new global chime – rural wealth and urban poverty. It has more than one ring to it. If you stay all your life in highly urbanised polluted Klang Valley, your final 10 years may be spent in hospital as your health gets poorer with every intake of polluted air from traffic jams.

Toxins include ultrafine particles, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide. These particulate matters damage your respiratory and cardiovascular systems, landing you in vastly overcrowded hospitals.

Parts of Kinta Valley are sadly speeding there. Main roads in large housing estates now resemble residential suburbs in Kuala Lumpur with their constantly heavy traffic flow, as motorists from elsewhere pass through these suburbs on their way to city centres and back. These areas don’t get wealthier, but the air gets poorer.

No city in Malaysia has prioritised bus transport system development so that car owners need not use their vehicles for every trip they need to make. We refuse to learn from so many cities in the world that have reached a workable compromise with the automobile industry, whereby motorists drive only half the time and take the bus for the other half the trips they make every week.

Fortunately, some Malaysians are quick to ride the new global trend and have packed their bags to go rural. Just like headmistress Nor Hizan Abd Jalil, Mohd Amirul Idris bought an 8-hectare padi smallholding in Langgar. Specialising in growing high-quality variants, he harvests up to 9.5 tonnes per ha and earns RM6,000 a month.

It has been demonstrated in Sekinchan that 11 tonnes per ha yields are possible with conversion to five-season rice fields and use of organic fertilisers.

Civil engineer Tam Pak Suew plants organic rice in Johor on floating platforms filled with high-quality moist soil in a large pond. He gets double the yield compared with rice grown the traditional way.

Sergeant (Rtd) Mohd Shah Rahman, who ventured into small-scale fertigation farming, uses the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor key factors such as fertiliser composition and water pH levels. He manages to harvest about 1.5 tonnes of eggplant after 45 days of planting.

Nor Aine Jamaluddin, a Bachelor of Science in biodiversity and ecology graduate from Universiti Malaya has ventured into hydroponic farming in Kuala Pilah. She grows a large variety of vegetables including mustard, kale, spinach and lettuce which are in demand in the market. Furthermore, she uses self-formulated organic insecticides and believes that eco-farming can be a tourism draw.

More dynamic government involvement in pushing local food production is necessary. Food importers have for years been given a free hand to saturate the market with foreign produce, resulting in a great over-dependence on imported vegetables, fruits, and rice. Without Thai brands, or rice bowls will be empty.

Further negative actions in the past have included the eviction of small farmers and the alienation of these lands to government-linked corporations which later sell the plots to private developers. State governments must reverse the flow by enlarging crop lands and devoting acreages to fish and dairy livestock rearing. Farm plot leases should be stretched to 20 years.

The Ministry of Tourism, Arts, and Culture should allocate resources to develop agrotourism such as by subsidising local group tour packages that include half-day visits to crop-farms with stays in nearby hotels.

Educationists who possess the same vision as that held by headmistress Nor Hizan Abd Jalil should be placed in strategic positions within the Education Ministry; we need advanced minds to overhaul the primary and secondary school curricula, placing importance on food production, economics, science, technology, biodiversity and cultural diversity.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Ipoh Echo

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