The country’s RM79 billion food import bill is the wrong thing to watch, Professor Emerita Dato’ Dr Roshada Hashim tells TNS News, and the self-sufficiency targets Malaysia keeps missing may be obscuring where the danger really sits. Her remedy: an independent Food Security Commission.
IN BRIEF
- Malaysia’s RM79 billion food import bill is the wrong thing to watch. Roughly a quarter of it, spent on rice, wheat, maize, soybean meal and fertilisers, is where the risk actually sits.
- The self-sufficiency ratio flatters. Malaysia grows 95 per cent of its chicken, but the feed is almost all imported.
- Rice self-sufficiency has fallen to about 52 per cent, the 2025 target was missed, and the 2030 goal has been cut. Roshada blames a research system where palm oil built an innovation system.
- Roshada wants an independent Food Security Commission, insulated from short-term politics, and a shift from self-sufficiency to resilience.
BY TENGKU NOOR SHAMSIAH TENGKU ABDULLAH
KUALA LUMPUR, July 18 – Malaysia is measuring its food security with the wrong numbers and needs an independent Food Security Commission to put it right, one of the country’s most distinguished scientists and higher education leaders said today.
Professor Emerita Dato’ Dr Roshada Hashim told TNS News that the RM79 billion food import bill which dominates the national debate, and which has nearly doubled in a decade, reveals little about how exposed the country really is.
“Malaysia’s vulnerability is not simply the RM79 billion food import bill,” she said. The part that matters is the RM18 billion to RM20 billion spent on rice, wheat, maize, soybean meal and fertilisers, the imports Malaysia cannot do without and cannot quickly replace. “This in itself is a vulnerability.”
The second number is the one Malaysia has built its national targets on. The self-sufficiency ratio can show a country feeding itself while its farms run on imported feed, fertiliser and seed. Malaysia produces close to 95 per cent of the chicken it eats. Almost everything the chickens eat comes from somewhere else.
“We are, to a large extent, at the mercy of countries that produce these feed ingredients,” Roshada said. “They can raise prices, restrict exports or prioritise their own domestic needs.”
Roshada, a Budi Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, is a scientist, educator and higher education leader, recognised for her contributions to fish nutrition, university reform and academic integrity. Her proposal is not an agricultural policy but an institutional one, and it comes from someone with a record of reforming institutions.
The yardstick that hides as much as it reveals
Beneath both numbers sits a distinction Roshada says policy language blurs. Sufficiency means enough food is produced or available. Security means everyone can obtain enough safe, nutritious food whenever they need it. The first is only a component of the second. A country can import all it needs and still leave people food insecure, if economic, social or logistical barriers stand between them and the shelf.
The evidence is not kind to the target. Malaysia’s rice self-sufficiency ratio, or SSR, has been sliding: 62.6 per cent in 2022, 56.2 per cent in 2023, and about 52.9 per cent in 2024. Agriculture and Food Security Minister Datuk Seri Mohamad Sabu put it at 52.6 per cent nationwide this year. The government’s target of 75 per cent by 2025 passed unmet, and the ministry now aims for 70 per cent by 2030, below the 80 per cent it once set.
Mohamad told the Dewan Rakyat in February that the ratio had yet to rise, citing shrinking and underutilised padi areas, slow development of new land, and irrigation that cannot support higher yields. The government, he said, accepts the gap is large and cannot be closed by existing approaches alone.
Roshada would go further, and question the yardstick itself. She accepts the ratio as an indicator of production capacity and import dependence, “but it is not, by itself, an adequate measure of food security.”
A low ratio need not imply insecurity, she said, if imports are diversified, affordable and supply chains hold. It is the reverse that should trouble Malaysia.
A high SSR does not guarantee food security if domestic production depends heavily on imported inputs such as fertilisers, feed ingredients, or seeds.
PROFESSOR EMERITA DATO’ DR ROSHADA HASHIM
A research system where an innovation system was needed
Malaysia has equated food security with rice security for half a century. Roshada thinks the framing outdated, and her explanation for the slide in production is the sharpest argument she makes. The country has invested in rice research for decades. The problem, she says, was never the science. Rice research sat within institutions responsible for many commodities, leaving broad mandates and dispersed resources, with no dedicated entity integrating research, seed development, extension and commercialisation into a coordinated whole. Palm oil had exactly that.
“The issue is therefore not the quality of research, but the absence of an integrated innovation ecosystem comparable to that which propelled the palm oil industry,” she said. “As a result, scientific advances have not always translated into widespread adoption, higher productivity and industry transformation.”
Economics did the rest. Industrialisation offered better paid work, younger Malaysians left for the cities, and padi land now falls idle as older farmers retire without successors. The Auditor-General’s Report for 2022 found 22.7 per cent of padi farmers earning less than RM600 a month.
“Even the best research cannot reverse the decline if farming remains economically unattractive,” she said.
Land structure compounds both. “Many paddy fields are small and fragmented, and some have multiple owners as land is passed down through generations,” Roshada said. “This makes it difficult to consolidate land, invest in modern farming systems or manage production on a larger scale.” Unless that is addressed, she argues, efforts to lift productivity will stay constrained.
From a foreign field to a Malaysian table
Feed is where that dependence bites hardest, and it is not only maize. Almost all major ingredients, including soybean meal, wheat-based ingredients, fish meal and animal protein meals, are brought in. “Any disruption in the exporting countries will eventually find its way to our dinner table,” she said. Feed prices rise, and with them the cost of chicken, eggs, meat and farmed fish.
Efforts to develop local feed alternatives have been fragmented and never at the scale needed. “This is an area that, in my view, has not been addressed with sufficient urgency.”
What troubles her most is not scarcity but nutrition. “We may have sufficient calories available, but that does not necessarily mean people are adequately nourished,” she said, with lower-income households leaning on cheap carbohydrates while falling short on protein and micronutrients. “Nutritious food may be available in the market, but can people afford to buy it regularly? If healthier food is beyond the reach of a significant part of the population, then we still have a food security problem.”
Protein, and the field she knows best
Roshada spent her research career in aquaculture and fish nutrition, and it is where she is least satisfied. “Capture fisheries have their limits. We cannot simply continue harvesting more fish from the sea,” she said, which makes aquaculture central to protein supply. “We have the species, the climate and decades of research experience.” Yet fish farming carries the same imported-feed exposure, and feed is among the largest costs of production. “I am not convinced that we have approached it with the focus, coordination and urgency that it deserves.”
Her proposal is deliberately narrow. “Perhaps we need to focus our efforts on one or two species, such as catfish and tilapia, and develop highly efficient and sustainable production systems around them,” she said. The goal need not be premium omega-3 rich fish, but affordable and reliable protein. On feed itself she argues for diversification rather than replacement, with investment in local alternatives such as black soldier fly larvae and poultry by-products, since soybean meal and fishmeal will continue to matter.
What decades of subsidies bought
On subsidies, her concern is structural rather than financial. The problem is not the size of the allocation but what happens between allocation and farmer. With multiple layers of administration, agencies, contractors and programmes, the value reaching the farmer can be considerably less than intended.
“The farmer may be the stated beneficiary, but is often at the end of a very long chain,” she said.
She is not against subsidies, and accepts many farmers would not survive without them. But she poses a harder question: “What have decades of subsidies actually achieved?” If they were meant to transform the sector, she said, productivity, incomes and the industry should by now be stronger. “Perhaps the problem is that subsidies have been used mainly to keep the existing system going rather than to change it.” Malaysia subsidises inputs and production, she argues, but has invested far less in farm consolidation, mechanisation, better irrigation, new technologies and professional farm management.
“Subsidies may be necessary in the short term, but they should be tied to a longer-term transformation of the sector,” she said. “Otherwise, we risk spending more simply to maintain a system that is already struggling.”
A commission, not a collection of projects
For her, the issue is therefore one of governance and long-term planning. “I believe Malaysia needs an independent Food Security Commission, insulated as far as possible from short-term political interests,” she said. “It should be technically driven, highly structured and guided by a long-term national plan for food production and distribution.”
What would change is how decisions get made, and on what grounds. “Decisions on what to produce, where to produce it and how resources are allocated must be based on evidence, suitability and national food security needs,” she said.
We cannot continue treating food production as a series of projects. Food security requires a system.
PROFESSOR EMERITA DATO’ DR ROSHADA HASHIM
What replaces the self-sufficiency target, in her formulation, is resilience: domestic production, diversified imports, strategic reserves, protein resilience and adaptive policy. “The objective is not to eliminate imports, but to reduce vulnerability arising from excessive dependence on any single source,” she said.
“Self-sufficiency measures where food comes from,” she said. “Food resilience measures how well the system continues to function when something goes wrong.”
“Food security is not about producing everything ourselves. It is about ensuring Malaysians can always put safe and affordable food on the table, even when global crises disrupt supplies,” she said. “That means producing more where it makes sense, importing wisely where it does not, and building a resilient food system that is less vulnerable to shocks.”
- TNS NEWS
This is the first article in a TNS News series on food security. Part Two examines rice, the politics of the staple, and whether Malaysia’s self-sufficiency target can be met.