Off-farm employment and spatial distribution in integrated agricultural development area north west Selangor (NWS) using geographic information system (GIS)

This paper presents a new structure of research in off-farm employment among the paddy farmers in Malaysia. Most of the paddy farmers in Malaysia are earning low income from paddy plantation due to unstable yield, even the government invests heavily in the sector. Off-farm employment is referring to the participation of individuals in secondary job away from their farm job. Participation in off-farm is important in order to improve the economy of paddy farmers. Research done by Cummings (1992), defines off-farm employment as where the work done off one’s own farm or work for pay or profit done at home and it is separated from the current farm business. The usage of GIS in social science still has a big potential. The objective of this study is to investigate the involvement and location distribution of 250 paddy farmers and farm households in off-farm employment in IADA NWS using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to capture a farm location effect on mobility with regional condition, such as to work or to the nearest town. The demographic research using GIS is referring to two different phenomena in the same geographic spatial location including individuals and households as the phenomena and other type of phenomena such as house, road, river or forest that stays evenly in geography spatial. Later, the diversification of on and off-farm activities will be presented in GIS. Location-specific information of a paddy lot for an entire region is best handled by a computerized information system such as GIS, where the software provide tools for the display and analysis of spatial information Starr and Estes (1990). This technique is used to describe the characteristics of the variables in terms of the frequencies and the percentage of distribution of the survey. Spatial analysis is a process of looking at geographic patterns in the data and the relationships between the features. Thus, the spatial analysis is also the process by which we could turn raw data into useful information. In order to increase the participation of farmers in off-farm employment, policy should be formulated by the government to increase the availability of off-farm jobs in the vicinity of farmer’s communities, since there may be great diversities in the social, cultural, economic and institutional characteristics among farmers’ communities.

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