HOW do we feed our national population? Agriculture is how, and it makes up nearly 10% of Malaysia's GDP. Thirty-four million Malaysians depend on this industry for food. But how long can our agricultural produce last? Can our agriculture produce keep up with the rising population as it reaches 41 million by 2050? How do we know whether we have enough food supplies to feed the growing demands of the Malaysian population?
The world unanimously uses the Global Food Security (GFS) index to determine how secured food supplies are for a country. This index looks at four important metrics namely affordability, availability, quality & safety and most importantly, sustainability. Malaysia has an index of 69.9%, which ranks it 43rd out of 113 participating countries. If this was an exam, we would have scored a B-, which is not too bad in my opinion. But these metrics, although very scientific, can be quite complicated for regular people to understand.
In the context of the Malaysian government, a different set of measurements known as the Self-Sufficiency ratios (SSR) is used to objectively and accurately measure our domestic food supply levels. It calculates the difference in percentage between how much food is produced domestically and how much of this is consumed. In short, SSR tells us in a more straight forward way whether we have enough food to feed the population.
According to the Department of Statistics (DOSM), the SSR of our food commodities, especially rice, beef, vegetables and fruits in 2021 shrank by an average of 11.7% compared to 2015. This indicates that our domestic agricultural outputs are not sufficient to meet our consumption growth. Our rice, including from our domestic production and import is only enough to last us for the next eight to ten months. But if another catastrophic event, such as an epidemic or prolonged drought were to hit the country, there was no telling whether Malaysians could survive that long.
Even though SSR provides a useful measurement of the current domestic food supply levels, it does not guarantee sustainability in the long run, especially in the face of social and environmental uncertainties. Nevertheless, it certainly serves as an excellent reference point of the food supply state we are in now and for the government to step up their game in beefing up the productivity levels of our agricultural sector. Otherwise, Malaysia may very well be faced with unnerving shortage of food supplies in a not-so-distant future.
![Malaysian rice consumption rate versus yield for 1991 to 2021 [2]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/935032_b2de2e520d3a4ff8b2085d39915b7537~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_371,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/935032_b2de2e520d3a4ff8b2085d39915b7537~mv2.png)
To shed more lights on the alarmingly poor state our food supplies, let me take rice, the staple food for Malaysians, as an example. The consumption rate of rice in Malaysia has grown tremendously high in just over 20 years from 1991 to 2021 reaching 3.1 million mt in 2021 compared to only 0.7 million mt in 1991, marking a significant increase of 4-fold. This trend is worrying at best as it exceeds our domestic rice production rate with the area of harvest remaining unchanged over the same period of time, which seems to suggest either we have run out of arable land to expand our farms or we have not been optimising our rice yield per hectare.
In 2021, our rice yield fell short by 40% against our consumption growth, and this shortage is expected to continue worsening with our rice yield only enough to meet a quarter of the national consumption rate by 2050. To compensate for this shortfall, Malaysia has been importing rice from neighbouring rice-producing countries, like India and Thailand, to keep up with the national consumption rate (data not shown).
Nevertheless, as the world’s populations continue to grow, especially with India reaching 1.7 billion people in 2050, there may not be any more rice left for us to import. This, coupled with the impoverished state of Malaysia's agricultural productivity levels poses a serious threat to the overall outlook of our future national food security.
References:
[1] Supply and Utilisation Accounts Selected Agricultural Commodities 2015-2021, DOSM
[2] OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 1991-2014 & 2014-2023, OECD
Disclaimer: All data are properties of their respective owners, unless otherwise stated. All charts and graphics are properties of Hafeez Hamdan.
This is a free-access document. To cite this work, use: Hamdan, H. (2024, March 4). On Malaysian agriculture and food security outlook. https://www.hafeezhamdan.com/post/malaysian-agriculture-and-food-security-outlook
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