Johor is the state with the third highest productivity in agriculture. With the Kluang 2030 Plan, one of the focus is to develop the Kluang Town as the modern food farming center, followed by the development of agro-tourism.
Issues
However, as I look into the context, the main focus of Kluang’s agriculture are more on live stocks, ornamental products and especially oil palm plantation where nearly 84.4% of land was used for it in 2015. As we zoom out from the context into wider range, Johor still has the highest oil palm acreage in Peninsular Malaysia according to an article I read before. It can be said that Johor’s agriculture is more focus on high earning, capital intensive activities. This is why plantation sectors are barely developed within Kluang. As urbanization happened, manufacturing and services sectors keep expanding in Kluang, the situation become even worst as the locals are not attracted to involve in agriculture sectors.
Apart from this, the agriculture sectors in Kluang are actually scattering around at the outskirt of the town which causes an unfair competition between farmers due to the different level of reputation each farms acquired. Buyer cannot have an overview of products over Kluang and just choose the one which is more famous. Thus, limiting the working opportunity for the locals to get involve in agriculture sectors. Besides, this isolated situation of farmers can also causes slower development in agriculture sectors due to less or even zero corporation, communication, helping each other.
When Johor, the state with third highest productivity in agriculture, putting less effort in food producing sectors, the consequence indeed causes an issue on food supply because there are demands of the market on larger quantities and varieties of food as manufacturing and services jobs encourage greater household expenditure. Thus, Malaysia had to find a way to fulfil the demands, and what the country did now is through importing the foods. As for vegetables and fruits, the country had spent over RM 5,000 million importing the goods in 2015 according to the article I read. This had shown how dependent we are on other countries to fulfil the demands of food. Recently, as Covid-19 hits the global, this issue had been magnified greatly as all countries are closing the “gate” and we barely can import foods from the outside.
Approaches
Hence, an awareness is raised to look into the agriculture sectors, especially plantation of vegetables and fruits. The design intention is to achieve sustainable development and growth of agriculture and food industry by promoting modern agriculture through the education of knowledge in order to encourage involvement of younger generation in the agriculture sectors. Furthermore, prepare manpower or profession in food producing and supply for own country, decreasing import and rely on other countries as well as trigger local economic growth by providing more working opportunities to achieve sustainable development of community.
This can be done by providing a platform that gathers all the local farmers together, creating connection and bonding for mutual improvement. The local farmers can share their idea, knowledge and experience. Moreover, provide workshop and training in order to give theoretical support as well as practical support (simulation through virtual reality technology) in both plantation, processing aspect and management, operation of their business. They can also gain knowledge in advancing the technology of agriculture through interaction with the profession and farmers at the international level. Besides, training the local farmers to be creative and innovative in exploring the possible processed products from raw products as well as finding the market values for the products. The approach is also to provide technical support through the research and development activities for higher efficiency in managing their crops and products (planting, harvesting, processing).
Impacts
The approaches can provide a lot of chances by opening up the market of food industry (processed food) through a variety of crops and products. Furthermore, not just only creating healthy competition where resources are shared among the farmers, instead forming corporation between farmers by distributing the portion of crops needed to be planted based on the market demands for mutual benefits. Farmers can transform their land use for different crops easily from the help of experienced farmers who planted the same crops before. Thus, forming a plantation community that can learn from each other to achieve sustainable growth and development.
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