Exploring the wellbeing and challenges faced by smallholder plantation farmers in Malaysia: A systematic review

Abstract

This systematic review article focuses on the wellbeing, challenges and issues faced by smallholder plantation farmers in Malaysia. Malaysia’s smallholder plantation farmers come from diverse backgrounds and contribute significantly to the nation’s economy. In spite of this, their plantations are not immune from constraints that influence their survival as well as their economic well-being. Additionally, several reports indicate that various efforts and support have been made by stakeholders to improve the situation, but to no avail, since there are still issues and challenges in place despite more than a decade of implementation. Hence, this study aims to systematically identify these challenges and issues faced by the smallholder plantation farmers in Malaysia. Through four steps of systematic review process, 23 related articles from 2010–2022 were analyzed. Eight categories have been identified to be the challenges faced by the smallholder plantation farmers and were grouped into two different categories. The categories and subcategories namely formal challenges include quality of government aid, unresolved land ownership issue among the smallholders, unstable market price and harming of environmental sustainability and the informal challenges include reluctant of young generation in smallholding plantation, lack of related knowledge in plantation, lack of finance stability and cultivation issues. With two main categories, the challenges and issues have been more clarified and seemlier manageable for their wellbeing. Furthermore, a number of recommendations were mentioned in this study for future research.