Malaysia small farmers risk management during Covid 19

The Covid 19 pandemic and lockdown in Malaysia impacted everybody including the agriculture industry. This industry is facing various challenges including climate change, market instability, and disease. However, this pandemic is making the situation the worst disaster, especially for the small farmers. Hence this study is assessing various risks faced by small farmers during Covid 19 pandemic. The common risk was faced by smallholder farmers in agriculture including production, farm incomes, labour shortage, intermediate inputs, delay of transports, and logistics because of having lockdown during Covid 19. About 47% of the farmers said the outbreak had made them unable to implement new farm and technology due to pandemics. The objective of this study is to determine the severity and probability of price risk, market risk, and production risk among farmers in Malaysia and to identify the strategies on market risk, price risk, and production risk among small farmers to overcome the risk during Covid 19 in Malaysia. Based on data collected from sample of 58 farmers, based on simple random sampling and used descriptive statistics and risk matrix for analyzing farmers risk on market risk, price risk, and production risk. The result show for the three top risks for market, price and production are “lack of marketing skills”. “high repayments commitments”, and “lack record-keeping”. The percentage for each resources are risk management strategies are “Enter into sales of price contract with buyers (55.2%) “agricultural support payment (44.8%) and “operation production cost” respectively. From the survey overall confident level of farmers to overcome the difficulties during the pandemic is moderate. The research has found in risk management approaches differ significantly depending on a variety of resources and categories on understanding the risk during Covid 19 pandemic among farmers. For researchers and policy makers to formulate effective policy measures, they have a thorough understanding of Covid 19 pandemic in Malaysia on 2020 regarding farmers risk management.