Climate change induced adaptation by paddy farmers in Malaysia

The climatic factors are changing very rapidly in Malaysia. For the farmers to adapt with the changes, government and other external agencies are providing several supports. But still there is a gap between farmers’ adaptability with climate change and current level of supports. This study uses descriptive statistics, ordinal regression, and percentile analysis to measure the level of farmers’ adaptability to climate change as a result of the various existing supports and encouragements provided by the government and other external agencies, and new supports expected by farmers. The data were collected through questionnaire survey on 198 paddy producing farmers in the area of Integrated Agricultural Development Area (IADA), North-West Selangor, Malaysia. The study found that among current types of supports provided by different agencies, only farmers’ accessibility in the market is statistically significant for influencing their current adaptability to climatic changes. Though 58.6% of the farmers agree that government supports are enough to cope properly with climate change, 12.1% of farmers are not able to cope with climate change with the current level of supports. Farmers’ expectations of several new supports has no statistically significant influences on their current adaptability with climatic changes, but their priority ranking for these expected supports will help policymakers to determine the future supports for climatic change adaptation for agriculture sustainability and livelihood sustainability under adverse climatic changes scenarios, especially for Malaysia.