The perception of local youths in FELDA scheme of east-coast Peninsula Malaysia towards the prospect career in oil palm plantation

The plantation sector especially oil palm commodity is currently the largest agricultural-based contributor to Malaysia economic projection involving both upstream (CPO) and downstream activities thus highlighting the necessity to sustain this sector for the benefits of this country on years ahead considering the higher potential of this commodity to gradually overtake the dominance from oil and gas sector in generating the globalized world today. However, despite the abundance of natural resources and the viability of Malaysia to continuously generate this commodity, human resources is seen to be the restricting factor that potentially jeopardize the sustainability of this sector. This in fact is common since the local youth who supposedly be the one who is responsible to become the main player in driving this sector however become somewhat repulsed rather than attracted thus negatively perceive this sector as being rather unsuitable for their prospect participation. Since the fate of this sector is being put on a stake, recruiting foreign labours is the only way out from this dilemma. Unfortunately, drastic and desperate alternative although it might seems effective in solving a problem is not always the best measure when it comes to a long term effect since the dominance of foreign work force is giving birth to the rise of new problems to every studied aspects in Malaysia. Therefore, these elements of repulsion as well as attraction must be identified and exploited in order to reconstruct their perception into being more promising for a prospect participation. Regardless of their current acceptance rate on perceiving this sector, this research aimed the East-Coast local youth whom live closely associated with agricultural background since they were described to be otherwise. Thus, the study of their perception is considered as the core study towards disintegrating the emerged crisis since their reaction towards every possible push and pull factors in causing them to have either a repulsed perception or attracted perception to plantation-based career that valid enough to be qualified as the standard benchmark representing the whole population of local youth in Malaysia. In conjunction, this study was done in order to analyse the possible aspect that might be the pull or push factors in constructing a particular pattern of perception among the selected respondents. Accordingly, they were selected from settler's
scheme which owned by FELDA Plantation. A survey method through questionnaire was used to collect data from 82 of local youth between 16 years to 40 years old as focused respondents which were selected using random sampling method. Descriptive analysis was applied based on their demographic factors and the involvement of the local youth in oil palm plantation. This study has revealed that the most prominent factors in causing the selected respondents to have the lack of interest in plantation sector were currently insufficient wage rate and method of wage payment on daily basis with uncertain rate forcing them to work harder to earn such an unreasonable pay as well as higher risk in term of task execution and
environment. On the other hand, the improvement on social facilities and infrastructures as well as the rebranding of social status of employment have certainly increased the interest among the selected respondents to constructively and attractively perceive the plantation-based works as a prospect career.