HOW do you feed 33 million Malaysians? Agriculture is how. But not as we know it, experts say. Agriculture, they say, must become more like manufacturing.
Put differently, farms must become factories. They may be right, but where must the first bolt be fastened? The experience of many countries dictates that it is best begun in schools. Don't go thinking that this is a plot to turn everyone into farmers. No, that's not the idea.
There will still be a need for doctors, engineers and some such professionals. The idea of bringing farms to schools is more innocent and practical: to plant the seed of agriculture in everyone, including doctors and engineers, so that if it becomes necessary, even professionals can grow their own greens at home.
Last week's vegetable prices tell us it has become necessary now to grow greens at home. Lady's fingers were selling for RM16 a kg, a 166 per cent jump from RM6 just a month ago.
Long beans, tomatoes and eggplants bore similar out-of-this-world price tags. But these vegetables are easily grown. And schools can teach how, as some Tamil schools are doing as part of an initiative by the Consumers Association of Penang.
But schools must make agriculture a field of practice, not theory. The body of agricultural facts are in the farms, not between the covers of the school or college textbooks. We must take our students back to the farm. As one American educationist put it long ago: "Education is to give, not a fund of knowledge, but an ability to act." We can't agree more.
As teachers of teachers say, teach by doing, not just by telling. How do the schools do this? They can begin with the chalk and talk of science, but this must be quickly followed by experiential learning in the school farm.
They used to do that in some primary schools in the 1960s, but even then there was no attempt to integrate other school subjects with agricultural science. In 1983, Man and Environment was introduced as a primary curriculum in an attempt to integrate the seemingly disparate school subjects, but was dropped in 1993 when it was found to be too taxing for the young minds.
This on-off education policy tells more about the competence of our curriculum developers than the capacity of our primary students. But integration is critical at the primary level if it is to be carried through to secondary, college and university levels. Such integration will lead to a spike in interest in agriculture as a livelihood. If ever Malaysia needed a spike in the interest of agriculture, it is now.
But enthusiasm for agriculture is as old as the first generation of farmers. The average age of Malaysian farmers is 50, an unhappy average for a country struggling with food security issues. Like in Europe, and to some extent in the United States, too, farming in Malaysia began as a family business.
The ardour of the first generation has somehow escaped the second and third generations. Zeal is a child of love. And love for farming, like love for anything, must be nurtured. But it must start early. Only then it has a chance to replicate the avidity of old.
Lest we forget, Malaysia was an agricultural nation before it became a manufacturing one. It is always the farm that comes before the fork.