And that is why Prime Minister Najib Razak continues to court farmers and works to keep smallholders and Felda settlers happy.
According to a Bloomberg report, Najib needs to keep smallholders happy as he seeks the votes of rural and semi-urban areas to retain power in the next General Election due by 2018.
“Farmers — many of them ethnic Malays — are a linchpin for his party, which leads one of the world’s longest-ruling coalitions. Their votes have a higher weighting than their work, which contributes to less than a tenth of gross domestic product.”
The report said, at the next General Election, Najib would probably further target the bottom 40 per cent of the population who can swing votes in tight races.
At stake for Umno, the report said, was the unbroken rule of its BN coalition since independence in 1957.
Umno is watching Najib’s ability to shake off a year of political turmoil – including the problems at 1Malaysia Development Bhd, the state investment arm that he established and which is at the centre of probes in at least six nations – and focus on bolstering a slowing economy.
Najib, the report said, had pledged bigger subsidies for rubber planters and rice farmers in the 2016 budget. He announced monetary handouts this month for rubber farmers totalling RM194 million.
The report quoted farmer Fairuzita Mohamad Amir, a voter in the Sungai Besar parliamentary constituency which was won on June 18 by the BN’s candidate from Umno in a by-election, as saying:
“I learned to say Umno along with my ABCs. Over the years, they have helped me a lot. I need their support and they have mine.”
She cultivates paddy on 2.5 acres of land with the help of subsidies plus access to fertilisers and pesticides, for which she credits Umno.
The report quoted Isman Abdul Karim, who grows palm oil on a 5-acre plot of land near Sungai Besar, as saying he won a manual oil palm roll picker at an event organised by the Ministry of Plantation Industries and Commodities in the days before the Sungai Besar by-election. Other prizes included bags of fertiliser, and a motorised palm oil fruit cutter.
The father of nine said his life had improved over the years. One child received a government scholarship to study in the US and is now a computer engineer. He said there was no other party but Umno for him.
Bloomberg quoted Khor Yu Leng, an analyst who has published papers on Malaysia’s political-economy including voting trends in the 2013 election, as saying: “Even as Malaysia becomes more developed, the importance of the farmers and the rural voters remains intact. The concentration of seats in farming areas is quite big for Malaysia, and Umno will want to strengthen that.”
“Farmers and fishermen are from the mainstream Malay heartlands and those heartlands are key to Barisan Nasional regardless of any issue, whether it’s about GST or 1MDB,” said Ahmad Martadha Mohamed, dean of the college of law, government and international studies at Universiti Utara Malaysia. “If the prime minister continues to provide support to these groups, they will continue to support him in the future.”
The importance of rural voters can be seen in Malaysia’s electoral map. Settlers under Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority — a government agency known as Felda formed in 1956 with World Bank funding to help steer the rural poor out of poverty by providing them with land to plant — are backbone voters in over 50 districts, according to the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research.
In the last general election there were 125 rural seats and 54 semi-urban ones, of a total of 222, said Khor.
“State assistance touches every aspect of their lives — an education grant for their children, an entrepreneurial grant, a house, or do they want to choose to go on their own,” Khor said of smallholder farmers, who number more than 600,000. “It might appear illogical to vote for the opposition because what if you get punished?”