THE Sarawak government, concerned with padi growers abandoning the food crop and turning their land to planting more lucrative cash crops, is mulling a policy on how to protect its shrinking padi farmland, Premier Abang Johari Openg said today.

He said the government is still studying two options – whether to zone certain areas as padi-growing areas or gazette land that had been used for planting rice to continue to serve that purpose.

Earlier, the state Food Industry, Commodity and Regional Development Minister, Dr Stephen Rundi, in his address at the Sarawak Agrofest in Petrajaya, said there is a real need to gazette padi farmlands so the land will remain solely for padi planting.

The move, he said, is crucial for food security in the state.

Rundi said as the state needed 20,000-30,000ha of land for padi planting, farmers abandoning growing the key food crop and converting their land to planting more lucrative crops like oil palm is undermining the state’s food security.

“Not padi today, oil palm tomorrow,” he said as he exhorted a push to arrest the shrinkage.

Currently, only 14,000ha of land in the state are used to cultivate padi.

“Growing rice is a problem and rice production is going down. That’s because of our focus on palm oil.

“We made a mistake in our planning. We focused on palm oil.

“We all thought that palm oil was king.”

Rundi said due to the shrinkage in rice output, the state’s self-sufficiency level (SSL) also shrunk and now is only at 34%.

“That means we have to import 66% of our food,” he said.

Rundi added that if the state does not do anything to increase rice growing, the output level will further decrease.

He said in the 1980s, the state’s SSL was 58%. Then it shrunk to 42% in 2020.

Abang Johari said to encourage farmers to stick to planting rice, the state government will provide the basic infrastructure – water, drainage, irrigation, road and power – to the areas that have been identified as suitable for rice growing.

He named them as Banting in Sri Aman, Tanjungg Purun in Lundu, Gedong and Betong.

The premier said the cost to provide the drainage and irrigation in Banting alone would cost the state government more than RM1 billion. – September 22, 2023.