17/3/2017
Agriculture is an important sector in Malaysia. The concept of “New
Agriculture” was introduced in the Ninth Malaysia Plan (Malaysia, 2006). The
concept is not completely a new idea. The World Bank has predicted that
agriculture will continue to be a fundamental instrument for sustainable
development and poverty reduction in the 21st century. The emerging
new agriculture is led by private entrepreneurs in extensive value chains
linking producers to consumers and including many entrepreneurial smallholders
supported by their organizations. The New Agriculture sector in Malaysia
focuses on two categories which are the agro-industrial commodities and food
commodities. Included in agro-industrial commodities are crude palm oil,
natural rubber, cocoa, pineapples, tobacco, coconuts and pepper.
Agro-industrial commodities have more commercial value and are used as major
inputs for the processing activities. For the food commodities, it is included
of rice, vegetables, fruits, fisheries and livestock. Some of the food
commodities are also being processed while flowers are sold as cut-flowers and
not involved in the food processing activities.
Agricultural policy describes a set
of laws relating to domestic agriculture and
imports of foreign agricultural products. Governments usually implement
agricultural policies with the goal of achieving a specific outcome in the
domestic agricultural product markets. Outcome are related to a guaranteed
supply level, price stability, product quality, product selection and land use
or employment.
The policies
that government has formulated are namely, The National Agricultural Policy 1,
2, 3 (NAP 1-3) and The National Agro-food Policy (NAM). The main objectives of the
National Agro-food Policy (2011-2020) are to address food security and safety
to ensure availability, affordability and accessibility, to ensure the
competitiveness and sustainability of the agro food industry and to increase the
income level of agropreneurs.
In line with the Third National Agricultural
Policy, the new agriculture approach was introduced to activate the
industrialisation of the country's agriculture sector. This revolution will
re-activate the development of the agricultural sector and thus transforming it
as one of the nation's engine of growth. To accomplish this, the implementation
of the Ninth Malaysia Plan will be done based on the following policy thrust
which are increasing agriculture production including new sources of growth
with greater private sector participation, expanding agro-based processing
activities and product diversification, strengthen marketing and global
network, enhancing income of smallholders, farmers and fishermen and improving
the delivery service system. The ultimate goal in the agro-food production
development and downstream processing industry is to increase the number of
modern and commercial farmers, breeders and fishermen as well as agro
entrepreneurs to pioneer the development of the agro food sector which is
private sector driven, without displacing the traditional farmers, where their
production capacity will be enhanced to complement the benefit of the
transformation process through an increase in productivity and income. The
implementation of the Ninth Malaysia Plan is parallel with the strategic intend
of the country's leadership in revolutionising and industrialising the
agriculture sector into a modern, dynamic and competitive sector.
In trying to develop, the
government can look at outward looking policies. An outward looking strategy,
such as promoting tourism, is seen as a more modern approach to development, and one that relies less on
government intervention. A number of important global events forced many
developing countries to become outward looking, including a rising development
gap between countries adopting inward and outward looking policies. In
addition, the collapse of communism created an opportunity to adopt more
outward looking policies. Those that have adopted them, including India and
China, clearly benefitted from increasingly outward looking policies in terms
of growth rates and reduced poverty.
The benefits of outward
looking policies are derived from the benefits of free trade. For example, free
trade brings welfare gains from tariff removal and increased competition and
efficiency. In addition, outward looking countries may be better able to cope
with globalisation and with external shocks. However, the financial crisis and
its after-effects have forced many national governments to re-think their
policies and to minimise the risks of an outward looking approach.
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