The good earth and I: tilling the Malay bond with agriculture

 

Last weekend, I attended the Malaysia Agriculture, Horticulture and Agrotourism (Maha) exhibition in Serdang. I’ve attended a few earlier MAHA expos. I’d like to say I’ve attended most of them, but I’ve just discovered they’ve been held since 1924! So no, I haven’t attended nearly enough MAHAs.

I went on the last day, arriving at 10am, but even then, there were massive queues of cars and people trying to enter the event. I later read that more than five million people had attended the event – and it seemed that most of them came on the last day to share the joy with me.

Congratulations to the organisers for putting on such a great event!

I was hoping to buy items from merchants trying to get rid of their goods on the last day, but it felt like half a million other people had the same idea. So no, I didn’t get to buy the seedlings, tools, and fertilisers that I didn’t need—or that I had forgotten I already had at home.

One thing I noticed was that the vast majority of visitors were Malays.

There are a few possible explanations for this: it’s a government-related event, which is always a seal of approval for many Malays; no issues here about halal certificates or offending socks or scantily-clad women offering beer.

It definitely helped that the expo is also increasingly targeting families, with many family-oriented events that made parts of the expo look like a carnival.

Heart and soul

But I feel the real reason is that agriculture is very close to the Malay soul. We have a very strong connection. At heart, and often in our minds too, we are still a very rural, kampung people, with all the good and the bad that come with it.

We are accustomed to farming to put food on the table, and I personally feel that connection too. I grew up when padi was still being cultivated in Bayan Lepas, Penang. Padi fields used to surround Penang airport then: now they’re all gone, replaced by huge depots, hangars and housing.

The hills of my old kampung used to be filled with rubber trees; 

potong getah

 (rubber tapping) was a common occupation. Nobody taps rubber there now.

We had orchards growing the famous Penang durians and other seasonal fruits, as well as nutmegs—something quite common and unique to Penang then.

We also had swamps where we harvested nipah, both its fruits and fronds, while the swamps were also good for vegetable farming and padi cultivation.

Our houses were nestled among coconut trees, which were regularly harvested for their fruits or sap, which was used to make coconut oil, palm sugar, or toddy.

Even though most of these trees in my kampung, and in many other kampungs, are now gone, farming is still deeply rooted in the ethnic identity of most Malays.

Sidetracked into industry

This raises the question: why aren’t Malays more prominent in agriculture?

Sure, the GLC-related plantation companies are technically 

Malay-owned,

 and there’s Felda, with its hundreds of thousands of mainly Malay settlers. On paper, our participation looks good.

However, these are mostly political constructs that can’t hide our shortcomings over the last few decades, particularly when we rushed into western-style industrialisation, building factories to produce steel, cars, and industrial goods.

It turned out we couldn’t compete against lower-cost nations in these areas, and we weren’t very successful in such endeavours for other reasons. Corruption and politics certainly played a role, but there’s also a cultural aspect.

Most of these efforts were government-led attempts to get the Malay community to leapfrog from the 19th to the 21st century.

Human progress doesn’t quite work that way. The Malays, being rural-based, never had a tradition of industry or technology as in the west and societies such as Japan.

Forgetting our roots

Attempting to progress without acknowledging this was futile. Had we focused on agriculture instead, we’d have had a better chance.

Whatever technical skills we picked up from modern universities could have been directed toward improving agriculture, scaling it up, and commercialising it, much like China and Thailand have done.

We would have started with a definite advantage—our long history of working the land.

While we’d still need to train and educate people in science and technology, it’s a lesser challenge compared to trying to industrialise the whole country overnight.

In the old days when we were gung-ho on industrialising, agriculture was not seen as advanced or glamorous as software, computer chips or consumer goods.

But today, every field of science is being applied to improve agriculture—from gene splicing to satellite remote sensing to artificial intelligence to modern supply chains.

Major challenges like climate-induced food shortages due to diminishing arable land, invasive species, and deforestation are being addressed using the latest science and technology.

Newer issues like food security, exacerbated by these factors and human conflicts, also demand solutions that we in Malaysia are well positioned to provide.

We have many critical components for agricultural success: fertile land, ample sunlight and water, and a lack of extreme weather events. And we certainly have the people, millions of Malays who already have agriculture in their blood.

This is not a call to abandon other technologies and industries in favour of agriculture. Rather, it’s about focusing on and leveraging our natural strengths and advantages. Every industrialised society started as an agrarian society, so this is a well-trodden path.

Stewards of the land

Focusing on agriculture could also alleviate social problems such as urban migration caused by income disparities between urban and rural areas.

With land being so crucial to us, we’d be compelled to be more responsible stewards of it. There isn’t much new land being created, short of costly reclamation or destructive volcanic activities.

Had we focused on agriculture and married it with science, technology and entrepreneurship, we would have been much better positioned to deal with many of today’s social and economic challenges, including runaway inflation in food prices.

Not to mention the perennial problem of trying to elevate the economic status of Malays through various government affirmative actions that don’t seem to work and are causing a lot of societal fractures.

My mother used to say, 

berbudi kepada tanah

 (being virtuous to the land) would always ensure good things happen to us. That thought is as agrarian as it gets, and indeed, it is ingrained in most of us already. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.