Rice industry in Malaysia

After rubber and palm oil, rice is the third most important major crop in Malaysia.
It is also the most widely recognized grain in Malaysia, both in production and
utilization. In Malaysia, rice are primarily developed on the Peninsular and Borneo
Island, around 300,500 hectares in Malaysia Peninsular and 190,000 hectares in
Borneo Islands.
The average consumption of rice of Malaysian national is around 82.3 kilograms
for each year. The dispute development of population is calling for more
innovative progression to build rice output for consumption inside the country.Rice
production still faces many obstacles although rice production in Malaysia
demonstrated a positive development, which are related to economic, social,
technology, and to seek consensus to handle foundation and so on.
The challenges that Malaysia rice industries faces toady is industrialization,
urbanization, and extension of neighborhoods cause the finite of agricultural land.
As the times progressed and the country’s population rose, many fields were
developed into residential areas. As a result, the field is drastically reduced and rice
production.Apart of this, most young people are attracted by the industrial sector
and other promising and attractive jobs lead to the shortage of labor force. Today’s
teenagers do not want to work in the labor force region, so the majority of the labor
force now only left the older workers and minimum of young peoples.
In addition, lack of modern farming machines (paddy reaper harvester, paddy
transplanter), rice processing equipment also is one of challenge of rice industry of
Malaysia face today. For example rice milling machine, and rice by-products
reprocessing facilities to utilize them at full economic potential, such as rice husk
processing machines - flat die wood pellet mill and biomass briquette machine.
Besides, advanced agricultural machinery can improve work efficiency and reduce
labor force.The restricted paddy drying limits of rice processes still is the
bottleneck of the rice business in Malaysia. Quality debasement is caused by the
postponement in the drying of collected paddy which can adversely influence the
yield and the efficiency of rice factories.
The final challenge is existing by-products from rice plants are not completely
used by the rice organization. The rice factories deliver a critical amount of results,
for example, broken rice, rice wheat and rice husk. Nonetheless, just a shopping
center bit of those results are completely used. The greater part of the side-effects
are sold specifically to the downstream businesses at a subsistent cost.
Government in order to solve the above problems such as to accomplish the point
of 70% rice independence level (target in the Tenth Malaysia Plan), a few
measures have been taken by the government to settle the rice supply, for example,
by keeping up the rice store at 292,000 tons or maintained utilization for 45 days.
Also, the government set up a long-term contract with nations to import rice, with
the agreements to export palm oil or oil items to the related nations. Moreover,
Malaysia government expects to keep up or enhance the rice production rate by
overhauling the infrastructure of the current planting territories.
Furthermore, enterprises in rice industry assume responsibility in rice processing
activities consist of paddy harvesting, drying, rice milling and packaging plant.
The downstream industry includes esteem process industry, for instance, vermicelli
plant, rice flour mill, animal feed mill, rice bran oil plant. The aforementioned
challenges, along with the continuous rise in the energy cost and stricter
environment regulations, have combined to emphasize the growing importance of
the optimal planning and synthesis of a resource-efficient network of processes for
the rice industry.
There are prospects for the development of rice industry in Malaysia in order to
cater to the increased demand. With improvement in domestic incomes and a rising
standard of living, the production of affordable quality rice can be a step in the
right direction.