Agriculture in Malaysia that effected by Climate Changes

Agriculture is one of the sectors greatly affected by extreme climate change. Agriculture in Malaysia contributes about 3.6% of GNP and at least one third of the country’s population depends to the agriculture sector for their livelihood, with some 14% working in farms and plantations. From the land use perspective, about 39.2% of total land use or about 5.18 million hectares are planted with tree crops like rubber, oil palm, cocoa, coconut, fruits and vegetables. Thus, significant climate change definitely affects the agriculture sector in term of production as well as the impacting socio economics problem to the people involved in the sector and the nation as a whole. Physical damage, lost of crop harvest, drop in productivity, vigor and others related to crop potentials are examples of direct and indirect effect of the extreme climate change. Thus, occurrence of disaster due extreme climate change such as floods, could impact damaging effect on the economy, social and psychology of the people affected. Recent floods in Johor had displaced 110,000 people, damaging an estimate of RM 0.35 billion worth of infrastructures and RM 2.4 billion of economics losses. An estimate of RM 84 million worth of agricultural produce were damaged or losses affecting 7000 farmers. Agriculture is highly sensitive to climate variability and weather extremes, such as droughts, floods and severe storms. Several factors directly connect climate change and agricultural productivity:

• Average temperature increase
  
  
• Change in rainfall amount and patterns
  
  
• Rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2
  
  
• Pollution levels such as tropospheric ozone
  
  
• Change in climatic variability and extreme events

Climate Change plays a major role in determining crop performance. Within a climatic zone, the weather, as expressed by the amount of rainfall, sunshine hours, temperature, relative humidity, and length of the drought period, results in year-to-year variability of crop production. The primary concern related to climate change is the potential threat it poses to national food security and export earnings from plantation crops.