National Food Security

Dear Tun Dr. Mahathir,

The evils of currency trading has been becoming your main concern after the 1997-1998 Currency Crisis in South-East Asia. Although you sometimes did make sense in your currency talks, most often I could only find that you failed to understand the real economic problem which you had created for the nation throughout your 22 years' reign as the Prime Minister of Malaysia. You liked hi-tech, industrialisation, export-oriented industry, high rise buildings which sometimes served as white elephant due to over-spacing, mega infrastructure projects which stretched up the nation's risk exposure in foreign debt-financing, and huge township projects which caused oversupply in housing. But in the course of making your favourite economic choices you tended to neglect the economic potentialities which might be explored from the development of the agricultural sector.

Even when you had realized the importance of food security to the nation after the Currency Crisis, you did not pay full attention in Agricultural Development and never attempted to make Food Production a prioritised policy choice in order to promote food security. If there was any merit which you could claim in relation to good ideas like giving tax exemption for new food production project and continuing the Fund-for-Food debt-financing for qualified food production projects, the corruption and bureaucratic red-tape in obtaining the tax exemption approval and bank loan approval had created hindrances to the development in food production. As a result of corruption and bureaucratic red-tape, Malaysian people have to end up paying high food costs nowadays since most Malaysians still depend to a very large extent on imported food items for dishes served on their table everyday due to inadequate domestic production.

Some of the agricultural plans proposed and implemented during your reign of Malaysia looked very attractive politically but economically did not make sense at all. Take for instance, giving away goats (usually crossbred of Boer and Cashmere, or crossbred of Boer and Saanen) to the genuine goat farmers and expecting the farmers to pay back in terms of second generation goat stock logically sounds wise before going through indept retrospecting. However, when the farmers began to realize that the butchers only offered a very low price for their live goats because there were plenty of inexpensive imported Australian frozen meat (from pensioner goats or sheeps) being dumped into Malaysian market, the best thing the poor farmers could do was probably to slaughter their live goats for "korban" purpose and to withdraw themselves immediately from goat farming business in order to cut losses because animal feeds and veterinary medicines were not cheap. Had your officers given any serious consideration to the questions of acclimatization of Boer goats and economic feasibility of Boer goat breeding in Malaysia before you permitted them to implement such a luxurious and wasteful goat borrowing scheme in Malaysia?

If your officers had really given serious thought for encouraging the milk production in Malaysia, then most Malaysians should by now be able to go buy fresh milk directly from the dairy farms in order to avoid the danger of taking in melamine-enhanced cow milk powder, which must be imported from either mainland China or New Zealand.

If we could have really achieved the self-sufficiency in food supply at the national level, why should the commoners be required to pay much attention to the phenomena of volatile currency value fluctuations or high imported inflation? In other words, why should we bother too much about currency speculation or high import costs if we were already in a safe position of national food security? Underestimation of the importance of national food security was probably the biggest negligence that had been committed by Tun's administration in the past. And Tun should be brave enough to admit your negligence which had costed the Malaysians their decent quality of life in the midst of the high inflationary pressure that was being imposed upon the imported staple food items in Malaysia. Most Malaysians find it helpless about food cost inflation caused by expensive import because Malaysia is basically lack of self-sufficiency in food supply at the national level. I feel that Tun must more or less bear a bit of the responsibility for this problem.

Onlooker