Determinants of poverty among coastal fisherman crews in Kelantan and Terengganu, Malaysia

The poverty issue has become one of the most challenges problem is facing the United Nation since 1978 when planned to reduce extreme poverty around the world. The number of people who left extreme poverty line is increasing for example, in China about 200-300 million have lifted an extreme poverty during the period 1978-2000s. Furthermore, the worldwide poverty was reduced from 900 million in 2012 to about 700 million in 2015 (Millennium Development Goals). However, there are hundreds of millions of children still out of schools and do not have access to basic needs such as health care, electricity, and clean water. The majority of poor people is located in Sub-Saharan Africa and south Asian countries such as Pakistan, Myanmar and Vietnam. The Malaysian Government has started to reduce poverty early since 1970s and had successfully reduced poverty from 49.3% in 1970 to 1.6% in 2015. The great success was as the result of economic growth and policy the Malaysian Government had made. Despite of this success there is remain areas and sectors live in poverty that may because the monetary approach does not reflect the multidimensional poverty. The general objective of this study is to analyze the determinants of poverty among coastal fishermen crew in Kelantan and Terengganu and specific objectives are to profile socioeconomic variables, measure the rate of poverty, poverty gap and severity poverty, also to analyze the relationship between poverty and socioeconomic factors. The states of Kelantan and Terengganu selected as the study area because they have the highest number of licensed fishermen and also they have poor households. The primary data collected by using stratified random sampling during the period December 2009 to July 2010. The sample size was 662 respondents 315 from Terengganu and 347 from Kelantan. The SPSS software used to get the demographic profile of the fishermen households, to measure poverty was used Headcount Index, Poverty Gap Index, Severity Poverty and the Binary Logistic model used to estimate the indicators that influence the household economic status. The finding showed that most of the fishermen in both states are young or in the middle age, not highly educated and they have an income range between RM300 and RM2000. Moreover, the poverty was high extreme and normal/relative poverty, the Gini coefficient shown that there is a large gap between highest income and lowest income fishermen. The result of binary logistic showed that household size, marital status, income, education level, and having any type of transport such as motorcycle are the main indicators influence the household poverty. Whereas, the household durable goods and ICT they have positive sign but not significant. Therefore, the Government should support the fishing community with future investments to set them for better capitalization via development programs and cooperate societies. In addition, the Government should provide more credit facility that will increase the participation in the fishing sector. Moreover, the Government should also create some other profitable income generating for people living in the coastal areas. Finally, the Government should supply more housing for fishermen communities as most of them live in wood or semi-stone housing.

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