Development Issues, Policies and Actions is intended as a book of readings on development for the general readers and for the undergraduate and graduate students of development as a supplement to the text book on economic development. It is written with materials mostly taken from our recent research works on current development issues and policy actions in Malaysia and Bangladesh. As a result, we believe that the intended readers and students will find the materials fairly known and easier to read and comprehend. To make the book more reader-friendly, we provided a comprehensive summary at the end of each essay. Readers who are time pressed but want to know the basic contents and the key messages of the essays at the shortest time at hand, can do so by reading the summaries of the essays. An additional and special feature of this book is that it emphasizes on the holistic and ethical aspects of development. This aspect is least covered by most standard text books on the subject. In that sense this book will serve as a make up for the deficiencies of the text book materials in terms of ethical orientation, essence, and higher goals of development. We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the publishers and authors of all the research works from where the materials have been compiled for use in this book. Similarly we are profoundly thankful to all the scholars, particularly to Prof. Golam Dastagir of Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, and Prof. Munir Quddus of Prairie View A&M University, Texas, for their critical comments on the draft of the book. Specially, we are profoundly thankful and grateful to Prof. Datuk Dr. Syed Othman Alhabshi for writing the scholarly foreword of this book. Finally, we remain thankful to Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia and the International Islamic University Chittagong, Bangladesh for jointly publishing this book.

The importance of rive as a world crops, and its principal characteristics. The modern rice plant and the new technology: Greater potentials for rice production in the tropics. Problems of postharvest technology. Rice marketing. Some successful rice production programs. Promising rice research. Elements of a successful accelerated rice production program. A national rice program: putting the ingredients together.

There are approximately 500 different soil varieties in Malaysia, most is residual soil and coastal alluvial soil. This book presents a comprehensive overview of various aspects of soils in Malaysia. It covers topics including climate; flora and fauna; geology and hydrology; land use changes for agriculture; soil fertility; human-induced soil degradation; and soil contamination sources. It features information on the role of biological, chemical, mechanical, and physical factors in relation to soil properties. The book highlights land use impact, soil problems arising from contamination and its control methods, the management of problem soils, limiting materials as well as future soil issues. The presentation of different soils in Malaysia is organized through chapters based on two major soil groups (a) the sedentary soils formed in the interior on a wide range of rock types, and (b) the soils of the coastal alluvial plains. The book features information on how these various soil types affect the economy of the country and highlights the soil issues and challenges within the context of sustainable agriculture. Useful to graduate students of soil science, professionals, and agriculturalists, it provides extensive knowledge of agriculture soils in Malaysia in a concise and user-friendly manner.

Malaysia's transition from a country dependent on agriculture and mining to an industrialized society is readily apparent, but the process of change remains poorly understood. When R.D. Hill began studying agriculture in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei in the 1960s, he found swiddening, market-gardening, semi-commercial wet-rice cultivation and large scale plantations. Today, Malaysian agriculture has become highly capital-intensive and increasingly specialized, and many forms of production have all but disappeared. Once dependent on the export of primary products such as tin, rubber and palm oil, Malaysia is now an industrialized, middle income country. Singapore has nearly abandoned its primary sector. This completely revised edition of Hill's 1982 study, with two lengthy new chapters, explains the evolution of agriculture in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore over the last forty years, with particular attention to the agro-ecosystems of the major crops.