A Comparative Study on GFT Adoption Behaviour Among Malaysian Paddy Farmers

Introduction

“Green Revolution technology” refers to new seed and fertilizer inputs that are highly divisible and thus available to farmer. Major emphasis on Green Revolution inputs developed in the late 1960s. It wasn't until the “First Decade of Development” ended that analysis indicated that the Green Revolution may actually have a counterproductive aspect (Adnan, Nordin, Rahman, Vasant, & Noor, 2016; Adnan, Vasant, Rahman, & Noor, 2016; Karpudewan, Ismail, & Roth, 2012). Malaysian government has been taking initiative to promote the agro-based environment-friendly technology termed as (GT) Green Technology (Reeb, Hays, Venditti, Gonzalez, & Kelley, 2014). The GFT application is aimed at linking agriculture with the environment-friendly technology, which contributes to both sustainable agriculture development and for the significance of the next generation (Sinnappan & Rahman, 2011).

Early studies of Green technology pointed toward the direction which indicates that GFT enhance the farming production (Lorek & Spangenberg, 2014).A common themes was establish in these studies that issues raises where most of the farmer’s community is unable to understand the “green” terminology in Malaysia and its importance for the next generation (Jänicke, 2012) especially in paddy farming industry .Nevertheless, more recent research on GFT adoption indicate that farmers belong to farming environment but still their knowledge and awareness about GFT is very minimal (Mülhaupt, 2013).

While, the biggest agenda of Malaysia is to make farmer aware about GFT and transform current agricultural activities into advanced, innovative and sustainable practices. Recently, the Third National Agricultural Policy highlighted many issues to promote the sustainability of agricultural practices Ministry of Agriculture, (Murad, 2008; Othman, 1998). Conversely, this is not an easy task because there is a basic problems that the farmers will encounter, especially with regards to their understanding of GFT and sustainable agriculture (Le Gal, Dugué, Faure, & Novak, 2011). However, the segmentation of farmer behavior towards adoption and adoption of GFT depend upon the farming community characteristic. On the other hand, paddy farmer live in collectivist society where permission of others are important (Ahmad, 2015). There is much research on collective action has sought to understand the conditions under which decisions to community are most likely to adopt GFT. Community can serve as formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions) or informal constraints (norms of behavior or conventions), which influence social interaction (Arvola et al., 2008). Thus, a collective action dilemma refers to the ways in which rational behavior by individuals results in a tragedy for the larger collectivity (Arts, Frambach, & Bijmolt, 2011) or Hardin’s (1968) tragedy of the commons. However, as noted by (Gong, L. Stump, & G. Li, 2014) in collectivist society individual decisions about adoption technology are usually mediated by social controls or permissions. It has long been suggested that social interaction is embedded within the larger cultural ecological context (McCay, 2012; McCay & Acheson, 1987).