Agriculture in the Malaysian Region

Chapter 11. Agriculture in the Malaysian Region from the Late 1970s

226 Agriculture in the Malaysian Region 226 chapter 11 Agriculture in the Malaysian Region from the Late 1970s Agriculture in the Late 70s Agriculture in the Malaysian region should be seen in relation to a striking broader transformation economy in which it is embedded. Singapore saw a major move from the entrepot economy that had characterized it from its foundation in the early nineteenth century to become a regionallysignificant manufacturer. The wealth created by this move saw an increased demand for fruit, vegetables, meat and eggs, some of it met locally, some imported from abroad, especially nearby Malaysia. Despite the decline of its low-end manufacturing from the 1990s, economic growth has continued though with falling proportions of income being spent on food. Its agriculture has become highly industrial in character with labour-intensive production to a degree replaced by capital-intensive technologicallyadvanced production. Brunei, by contrast, has continued what it has been for more than a century, a petroleum-producer steadily becoming a rentier state with a very small, now largely part-time, agricultural sector where it survives. But it is Malaysia that has seen a remarkable transformation into a manufacturing and urban economy. That economy had retained agricultural production by plantations of tree-crops, by peasants and by tribespeople , to the extent that when Malaya became independent in 1957 some 39 per cent of the GDP was derived from agriculture (Fauzana 2007). But by the late 1970s change was already well under way (Hill 1979). Whereas in 1975, when about 52 per cent of the Malaysian workforce was still engaged in agriculture, forestry and in fishing, by 1980 the Agriculture in the Malaysian Region from the Late 1970s 227 corresponding proportion had fallen to about 48 per cent. This change was accompanied by remarkably rapid urbanization. In 1960 27 per cent of the population was reckoned to be urban. By 1980 this proportion had reached just over a third and was set to increase to 72 per cent by 2010. In the economy the application of labour was becoming increasingly diversified. Some rice production areas had already gone out of production , replaced by very low-intensity systems of cattle and buffalo grazing and by abandonment (see pp. 242ff). This was partly the result of both government policy, focusing upon the major traditional core areas in the north-west and north-east of Peninsular Malaysia where a significant dry season aided yields. Rice production had become more intensive with substantial subsidies for water and fertilizer being added to the price support system that had existed since the 1930s. Malaysia’s primary sector — agriculture, forestry and fishery — has not been marginalized in this structural transformation though rates of growth have generally been slower than in the economy as a whole. From 2000 to 2011 the real GDP grew at an average rate of 4.3 per cent whereas the primary sector achieved only 3.8 per cent, a respectable figure that compounded has led to slightly under a doubling of the real GDP over the period. (For raw data see Malaysia, Economic Planning Unit, 2005–.) In two of those years, 2003 and 2010, growth in the sector substantially exceeded that of the economy as a whole. While much of this growth has derived from the expansion of oil palm, most other sectors within agriculture have benefitted, even rice production which has steadily become more “industrial” in character following the wide spread of a series of major technical innovations that had begun in the 1960s. Of the two dominant tree-crops, rubber was under significant price pressure from synthetics by 1980 though its position in the global market was and has continued to be supported by steadily rising prices of petroleum feedstock and by the fact that natural rubber has no synthetic substitutes for some classes of goods, notably dipped rubber and other latex products. The international demand for edible oils of all kinds favoured the continued growth of the oil palm industry, a field that was to grow massively into the twenty-first century though accompanied by environmental concerns especially where it expanded onto peat lands. Other crops had fared very differently. By 1980 it was clear that coconut production, for export as copra, was very much a dying industry, surviving only in places in Sabah and Sarawak where the cost of labour was low enough to continue. Production of fresh nuts for drinking and use in the preparation of curries was and remains protected by local [3.141.202...