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Under the sustainability domain, food waste is a significant global challenge receiving growing attention. The management of household food waste which relies heavily on landfilling, is predominantly ineffective and unsustainable. To implement sustainable food waste management, an understanding of the individual behaviour is needed since psychological effects often undermine technological solutions. This study direct its investigation on urban households’ sustainable food waste management behaviour by extending the Theory of Planned Behaviour. An online survey was utilized for data collection. Using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling, assessments were made on the determinants of intention and behaviour of 520 households in the Klang Valley. The analysis support two factors that influence attitude positively, while five factors positively influence intention to implement best practices of reusing leftovers, separating household waste, and doing home composting. However, although the households have positive intentions, yet their composting practices seem to be the least adopted compared to the other sustainable elements. Addressing the lack of participation requires a holistic approach via dissemination of educational materials, social media coverage, and awareness campaigns. It is also suggested that composting be incentivized and be included in reward schemes similar to recycling. This study paves the way to enhance understanding of the factors to adopt sustainable food waste management among households in the urban areas. The findings provide insights for policy makers and other stakeholders on what type of information to consider when designing effective food waste management campaigns and urban development strategies, supporting the opportunity for consumer behavioural change.

Under climate change, Malaysia's agricultural production showed decreasing in recent decades. This study tries to fill in the gaps to applying and extending the Cobb Douglas production function theory to examine the impact of climate change and economic factors on Malaysia's agricultural production. Using Engle-Granger (EG) test with 37 years of data from 1980 to 2016. The findings showed that the long-run estimated coefficients for rainfall, temperature, and interest rate were -0.338, -0.024, and -0.029, respectively. This indicates that each additional percent in rainfall, temperature, and interest rate will be affected the agricultural production, on average, to decrease by 0.338%, 0.024%, and 0.029%, respectively, holding others constant. Besides that, the long-run elasticity of real GDP per capita, employment, and Trend showed 0.509, 0.513, and 0.119, respectively. Increase 1% of real GDP per capita will lead to the agricultural production to increase about 0.509%, ceteris paribus. The elasticity of employment showed that each 10% increase in agricultural employment will increase the agricultural production on average 5.13%, ceteris paribus. Furthermore, the trend estimated coefficient showed that the agricultural production will have a constant growth rate which is 0.119% per year. All variables were statistically significant to explain the long-run agricultural production. The short-run rainfall, temperature, employment, and Trend were statistically significant to determine the short-run production growth. Therefore, advanced technology and the latest information on climate change are relevant to boost agricultural production growth. In addition, policymakers also suggested establishing lower interest rate loan facilities and no labor shortage in this industry.

Sugarcane loading stations were established in the sugarcane business in Thailand for more than ten years to decrease the transportation cost of the small farmers. However, the participation rate was rather low. The main objective of this study was to investigate the factors influencing sugarcane small farmers to join contract farming with sugarcane loading stations. Descriptive analysis was used to describe farmers’ demographic profiles and farms’ characteristics. Factor analysis was used to determine factors influencing farmers’ motivation to join with loading stations. Social participation was revealed as the factor the most influenced farmers’ motivation to join with loading stations, followed by economic constraints and individual goals, which these two factors have also significantly influenced the farmers’ motivation to join with loading stations. Conversely, the sign of education (positive) and age (negative) were estimated in the logistic regression analysis, which increases age level will reduce the small farmers’ motivation to participate in the sugarcane loading stations, and the higher education level will increase the small farmers’ motivation to participate in the sugarcane loading stations.

A dynamic econometric model of Nigeria’s rice market was designed to serve as a base for future policy analyses. Using time-series data spanning 38 years, the model contains four structural equations representing paddy area harvested, paddy yield, per capita demand, and producer price variables. Estimates for these equations were obtained using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration approach. Results of the paddy production and yield sub-models showed that paddy area harvested, and paddy yield was price inelastic. Furthermore, the paddy area harvested responded favourably to technological advancement. For the demand sub-model, estimated own price and cross-price elasticities showed that rice has an inelastic demand response, with wheat being a substitute. A series of validation tests strengthened the reliability of the model for use as an empirical framework for forecasting and analysing the effects of changes in policies such as rice import tariff reforms on production, consumption, retail price, and imports.

This study is focused on determination of the important factors that have affected the agriculture production in Malaysia. The data on interest rate (IR) and government agriculture expenditure (GE) were collected from Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) monthly bulletin statistic. Besides that, the number of labor use in agriculture sector (LA) was collected from the World Development Indicator (WDI). All data collected were based on the time series (annually) from 1983 to 2016. In this study, the Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) and Philips Perron (PP) tests are used to determine the stationary of the time series data and the overall findings showed that the time series data are stationary at order one or I(1). In this study, the result of Engle Granger (EG) co-integration test was used and stated that all the factors were co-integrated with the agriculture productivity. However, the GE2 and interest rate (IR) are the only factors that showed a negative relationship. In the long run, all the factors are significantly affecting agricultural productivity, while the interest rate is insignificant to determine the agriculture production. Furthermore, the Error Correction Mechanism (ECM) model showed that all the factors are significantly influencing the agricultural production in Malaysia except the interest rate. In the nutshell, this study suggests that the policy maker should take the precautions in the budget spending in agriculture sector, which should not exceed the threshold spending of RM3,057 million.

Formal contractual arrangements cover a considerable share of globe agricultural production. Agricultural contracts can have many beneficial effects.They can help farmers manage price and production risks, thus encouraging more efficient use of farm and processing capacities. But contracts can also have less benign effects. They can introduce new and unexpected risks for farmers—in some circumstances, they can extend a buyer’s market power—and they can effect fundamental changes in how farming is organized and carried out.In this our article we address transaction cost theory (TCT) in some details as a theoretical framework in study of methodology of agreements and contracts,for proving the role and importance of this theory on agriculture contracting area based on eight empirical studies on assessing transaction costs in different farms. Main finding is there are diverse opinions on the applicability of the transaction costs theory in agricultural contracting scope of different management decision-making processes. These opinions developed over a long period of time following continuous improvement on the application of the theory in solving of the outsourcing business problems. These studies also proved that transaction costs are difficult to measure and there is no standard procedure to assess transaction costs, but they can and should be estimated because they are important cost elements in the decision-making process concerning the choice of contract for different outsourcing agricultural production stages.

This study examines the impact of the abatement of the export duty on the Malaysian palm oil industry performance. The simulation results show that the impact of reductions in the export duty rates and the impact of increases in the threshold prices on the Malaysian palm oil industry have the same impact but with different magnitudes. Even the simulated results indicate that the policy of further reductions in the Malaysian export duty will promote its positive effects on the local palm oil industry; however, the impact is shown to not be significant. The further reduction of the export tax is very constrained and believed to no longer be the most effective policy in enhancing the competitiveness of local palm oil industry in the future. Hence, policymakers have to be aware of the possibility that the reduction of the export tax may no longer be an effective sustainable approach in facilitating the development of Malaysian palm oil industry.