Innovation that can be capitalised upon

Sarawak can learn modern agriculture from Singapore, a ract more young people to undertake modern farming

KUCHING: Singapore’s vertical farming has been hailed as a very impressive innovation.

In stating this, Deputy Premier Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas also pointed out modern agriculture as one area that Sarawak could learn from the republic.

“This innovation makes use of modern technology to control the agriculture environment. This will make it very trendy and attractive, especially to the new breed of young educated farmers in urban areas.

“We want to encourage more young people to take up modern agriculture as their profession so that we can increase our production of food and food products,” said the state Minister of Infrastructure and Port Development when welcoming Singapore’s High Commissioner to Malaysia Vanu Gopala Menon to his office for a courtesy call yesterday.

On another ma er, Uggah said Sarawak was focusing on producing more rice, stating the Ministry of Food Industries, Commodities and Regional Development’s target of 60 per cent self-sufficiency level in rice production by 2030.

“So rice production is a very important focus for the government now. We look forward to using technological solutions like using drones to do the spraying of fertiliser and pesticide besides general monitoring.

“Thus, there is the need to use high-yielding hybrid seeds and mechanical harvesters,” he said.

Uggah added that when rice farmers could harvest more,

This innovation makes use of modern technology to control the agriculture environment. This will make it very trendy and attractive, especially to the new breed of young educated farmers in urban areas.

Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas

their income would also increase.

He said although Sarawak had been declared as a high-income state, there were still people earning low income.

“So helping them to increase their income is also very important to the government,” Uggah stressed.

Meanwhile, Vanu’s courtesy call on Uggah yesterday was among the programmes listed on the High Commissioner of Singapore’s itinerary for his three-day official visit to Sarawak.