FOOD & HEALTH SECURITY
MODERNAGRICULTURE
Modernising Agriculture to Shore Up Food Security With a lightning speed, COVID-19 pandemic has sparked an unprecedented global crisis and literally reset all the buttons for humankind. The pandemic has caused such an unimaginable toll on human death and suffering on earth in this century. Invariably, this corona virus crisis has sparked a remarkable convergence by governments around the world to put in place a myriad of lockdown actions to mitigate the situation and restore economic normality. In March, OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría estimated that the lockdowns would directly affect sectors amounting to up to one third of GDP in the major economies. Every economic sector will not be spared from its raging impacts and severe reverberations across business sectors ranging from tourism and hospitality, aviation and logistics, oil and gas to agriculture. On 24th March, the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) predicted that the real GDP growth of Malaysia in 2020 will drop from 4.0% to -2.9%. According to the World Bank, agriculture accounted for one- third of global gross domestic product in 2014, while the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has estimated that 60% of the world’s people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Therefore, it is anticipated that in the wake of COVID-19, there would be significant implications on food security as many countries see their food
supplies dwindle. World leaders are very critical about this scenario, and obviously would want to avoid the worst-case scenario from happening, that is to avoid the global pandemic from persisting over a long time, which could then spiral into yet another conundrum, leading to a global food security crisis. Food security is a concern in Malaysia as it is everywhere. Indeed, food security ranks among the world’s greatest challenges now and in the future. It is ranked second among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in the United Nations 2030 Development Agenda. Our economic planners and policymakers have incessantly strived and deliberated in great depth about our food security concerns to avoid unwarranted socio-economic consequences. By 2050, Malaysia is expected to add 9.7 million people to its present population of 31 million. With that inflated population, Malaysia will likely face a food crisis should a pandemic of sizable proportion revisits. We may be able to grow or produce food locally at high self- sufficiency levels, but that does not mean the country has attained the desired food security status. Food security is defined by the FAO (1996) as “when all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food preferences for an active and healthy life”. In 2013, the International Conference on Food Security deemed food security as a multifaceted issue with four dimensions: availability, access, utilisation, and stability. This led to the
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Malaysian Technology Strategic Outlook 2019/2020 Intergration of High Technology
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