Recently our government spent a huge sum of money when it sent our BN MPs for an 'agricultural' tour of Taiwan. Wonder why we have not heard any one of them speak about or advice and offer timely solutions to the rakyat on how to combat a potential national crop failure.
Earth watchers, and recently even planet watchers, have raised the alarm about the growing global weather changes. Many of these scientifically supported findings are indeed most alarming and many progressive nations are taking painful measures to combat the challenges on short and long-term considerations.
Likewise, at our own market places and neighborhood parks, ordinary folks are acknowledging the increasingly unpredictable weather changes in our own backyards.
Today, we ordinary citizens here have come to recognise that what we learned in our geography lessons in schools twenty to thirty years ago, does not hold water any more. Gone are the predictable monsoon seasons and dry, hot spells that come in successions in a calender year.
The ‘intermittent’ and di sana-sini overwhelming thunder, lightning, rain and scorching heat which are announced on a daily basis by our national meteorological stations are already playing havoc even upon our little garden plots hugging tiny corners of the rows of terrace houses.
One then wonders how these weather changes will effect our smallholders and large-scale food-farms and plantations.
Is the government of the day prepared to meet these climatic changes with an adequate national food crop failure contingency plan? If there is such a contingency plan at work, how come none of our politicians are sharing and preaching it to the rakyat?
Why are our MPs, who recently got schooled in Taiwan, not sharing their knowledge with the nation so that all of us can play our little roles in working towards and coping with the increasing challenges affecting food cultivation?
Ordinary people are only crying about not being able to dry their clothes owing to unpredictable rainfall. Doctors are more than happy when the infamous flu sweeps across the nation. Ice-makers and sellers celebrate when the unannounced hot spells suddenly appear between the days in a week.
But why are we not into any worthwhile public awareness programme on how the global weather changes are affecting us? And why are our MPs who graduated from the 'agro-tour' in Taiwan not preaching to us on how we should respond effectively to surmount a potential food crop crisis?
Perhaps, as much as politicians tell us that Malaysia is safe from the current global recession, we are also safe and immune to the weather challenges sweeping across the planet.
Indeed Malaysia must be a very special place on earth. How blessed.
Seriously, it is high time we started discussing the potential food crop failure rather than keep harping on religion, race and party politics, incessantly.
Unless every citizen is prepared with adequate knowledge and awareness, the entire food chain - from cultivation to consumption - may just disintegrate when a major crop failure hits the world.
Who is accountable then?
