A closely contested by-election over the weekend, which saw victory for the ruling coalition, shows that the political terrain in multi-ethnic Malaysia remains divided and raises searching questions for the opposing sides.

The by-election for a seat in the Federal Parliament took place in an ethnically mixed area – Hulu Selangor, a district in central Selangor state that is fairly similar in composition to the overall population of the Malaysian peninsula.

Selangor is considered the richest state in this South-east Asian country, where 60 percent of the 28 million population consists of Muslims.

This has been quite a cynical election, noted Andrew Aeria, a political science lecturer at a local university. “Pakatan Rakyat (the opposition People’s Alliance) has to buck up and do more leg work if they want to win elections beyond urban areas among the working classes, especially the ‘bumiputera’ (indigenous) community.

“For the (ruling) Barisan Nasional (BN), there seems to be a swing to the right wing in terms of their ethnic political discourse – and they displayed an increasing reliance on money politics to stay in power.”

The BN candidate, a newcomer from the Malaysian Indian Congress party, defeated the Pakatan heavyweight Zaid Ibrahim by a narrow 1,725 margin, wresting back the seat from the People’s Alliance, which had narrowly won in the same district in the 2008 general election.

For Prime Minister Najib Razak, much was at stake on the by-election, in particular his 1Malaysia concept, which promotes national unity, and his New Economic Model to overcome economic stagnation. The full weight of the ruling coalition’s money, machinery and media was felt in the poll, observers note.

For the Pakatan, the by-election was a test of support for the Selangor state government, which it helms, and for the People’s Justice Party (PKR), whose candidate stood in the by-election.

The by-election was called following the death of PKR’s Datuk Dr Zainal Abidin Ahmad.

Although it was just a single parliamentary seat, the psychological stakes were high. This was the tenth by-election since the last general election in 2008, and the score now reads 7-3 in favour of the Pakatan.

Pakatan parties rule four of the 13 states of the Federation and aim to capture federal power in the next general election due by 2013 or sooner.

Prime Minister Najib Razak was determined to stop the People’s Alliance bandwagon from picking up more momentum.

Former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, now under trial on sodomy charges, claimed the ruling coalition had splashed more than 100 million ringgit (about 31 million U.S. dollars) in the rural district of Hulu Selangor during the campaign period to secure victory.

“We didn’t buy votes but we solve people’s problems. Those are genuine problems which have not been addressed for some time. They are really genuine,” Najib defended.

Despite the enormous resources it deployed, the ruling coalition mustered only 52 percent of the votes cast.

“The Hulu Selangor election result has shown that there is a majority of Malaysians whose vote cannot be bought and whose ideals are not in line with BN’s,” observed Lim Teck Ghee, the director of the independent Centre for Policy Initiatives, in a commentary. “In particular, the younger voters yearn for justice, fair play and good governance – attributes which BN seems to be incapable of embracing.”

But what apparently did not work well in Pakatan’s favor, according to a party campaigner from the Islamic Party (PAS) was that voters in the rural areas of Hula Selanger “relied heavily on the mainstream media, especially government-controlled television and newspapers.

“We had great difficulty getting through to them as they were constantly bombarded by mainstream propaganda,” he said.

Much of the Barisan Nasional’s racial rhetoric these days is being articulated by a right-wing group, Perkasa, which speaks of empowering the indigenous Malays amid rhetoric of Malay supremacy. They are backed by former premier Mahathir Mohamad.

Such rhetoric has blocked large numbers of minority groups from supporting Najib’s 1Malaysia concept, which they find lacking in substance. Popular support for the Malaysian Chinese Association, once a senior partner in the ruling coalition, has plunged even as the party is embroiled in factionalism and a crisis of leadership.

As for the Pakatan, which is made up of three main parties – PKR, PAS and the Democratic Action Party – Zaid’s defeat is a blow. Many had seen him as a potential successor to Anwar.

Said a commenter on a political blog – who simply went by the name KP – on the opposition party’s defeat in Hula Selangor: “I feel Pakatan has been overemphasising its support from the business and sub-urban/urban sections that they overlooked the fact that the proletariat and rural sections remain the majority in this country.”

“The key finding is that the Malaysian electorate remains highly polarised within ethnic communities and across generations,” observed political analyst Bridget Welsh in a post-election commentary that was published in Malaysiakini, a popular news portal.

The psychological battleground now quickly moves to the Barisan-stronghold of Sarawak state in north Borneo, where yet another by-election will be held on May 16 in the town of Sibu.

Both sides must be gearing up for what promises to be another intense battle ahead of Malaysia’s next general election.

Malaysia may have been spared the worst effects of the economic slowdown due largely to its oil and gas reserves and other natural resources.

But years of spending – some say squandering – of the nation’s oil revenues on prestige projects and bailouts could have gone into strengthening the country’s social safety nets. As the country’s export-oriented economy took a hit, workers lost their jobs, suffered pay cuts, worked fewer days and had their overtime pay slashed.

Children have been largely protected from the adverse impact of the economic crisis due to the social safety nets that were already in place. The government’s provision of universal benefits, notably free education and health care, as well as subsidies on a number of essential commodities, have been able to ensure that most children and poor families do not fall through the gaps, said Eva Jenkner, the deputy representative to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Malaysia and a senior economic social policy specialist.

“But concerns remain with regard to the comprehensiveness of the social safety nets, with only limited coverage rates of programmes specifically targeted at poor families and children, and many particularly vulnerable children out of reach of school-based social interventions (such as school feeding programmes),” she told IPS in email interview.

As coordinator of the Oppressed People’s Network (known by its Malay acronym, JERIT), Rani Rasiah is familiar with the plight of communities living on the margins of development, particularly the children.

In September 2008 as signs of an economic slowdown emerged, she carried out an informal survey among urban settler (squatter) communities around Ipoh, a major city between Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

“I found that in terms of food, children in these communities, were really affected. They were deprived of milk powder. Young children would be having black coffee for breakfast and there was no milk in their diet, no emphasis on a balanced diet.”

Unemployment crept up from 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 to reach 4.0 percent in the first quarter of this year before tapering off to 3.6 percent in the second quarter. The jobless figure swelled from 351,000 in the last quarter of 2008 to 451,000 in the first quarter of 2009 as manufacturing firms, faced with falling orders, shed jobs.

Quite apart from the actual job losses, it was the loss in overtime pay that hurt many families, observed Rani. “I found that low-income families, not necessarily the hardcore poor, were finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.”

These households might have two adults working typically as municipal council workers or factory workers, and they may own a motorbike. Before the slowdown, basic salaries would usually be around 400 to 500 ringgit (115 to 146 U.S. dollars). With overtime pay, take-home wages could reach 1,000 ringgit. “As long as the economy was doing all right, they were fine,” said Rani.

But when firms began slashing overtime and reducing the number of days worked, households suffered. Many had previously taken out loans, whether from banks or moneylenders, on the strength of their overtime-boosted income, and were unable to service their loans; others found their homes being foreclosed.

“If they have children, their situation is worse. Some of them had to stop their children from going to school because they can’t afford bus fares, which had really gone up. If they have three or four children going to school, bus fares (at around 40 ringgit [or 11.67 dollars] monthly per child) can take up a big chunk of their incomes.”

Rani said the government should subsidise school buses across the board. She added that people affected by unpaid housing loans and foreclosed homes to Malaysia’s central bank want the government to set up an easy loan scheme with low interest, similar to what civil servants are entitled to. “The government has spent billions of ringgit to save the corporate sector, but there’s nothing much for the poor,” she said.

To reduce the national fiscal deficit from 7.4 percent to 5.6 percent, the 2010 budget envisages drastic cuts in operational expenditure by 13.7 percent and development expenditure by 4.5 percent.

UNICEF’s Jenkner said it is important to more effectively target social expenditure and closely monitor household real incomes, social indicators and outcomes. This would ensure that households do not resort to short- term coping mechanisms, such as taking children out of school, reducing their nutritional intake or deferring health visits, all of which could have adverse long-term effects on children. This, she added, has been a central lesson of most crises, such as the 1997 Asian financial debacle.

Meanwhile, non-governmental organisations are struggling to meet the needs of the children who do fall through the gaps in the official social safety nets. Homes for children from broken and disadvantaged families and skills training centres for juveniles have experienced a sharp fall in donations.

Public donations have gone done by 20 to 30 percent, said Robin Devasagayam, director of the Monfort Youth Centre in Malacca, a residential care centre that provides training to 83 teenage boys in skills such as motor mechanics.

The renowned centre, run by a Catholic religious group, has expansion plans for a new double-storey building for language and computer maintenance. In the past, the group relied on donations from the public and companies to fund their work. “This time there have been few replies to our appeals,” said Devasagayam. “We have raised funds to put up the building, but we don’t have enough funds to furnish the building.”

Other children’s homes are badly affected as well. “Most of the companies have held back their year-end community service projects, and everyone is trying to protect their own interest first,” said S. Joseph, who runs a home for orphans and children of very poor single mothers on mainland Penang.

“Many of the cases I now encounter are due to parents being unable to provide for their children’s basic needs such as education because of financial difficulties. But I can’t take in all these children, as I have to provide for those already here,” he lamented. Donations at his home have dropped by an average of 50 percent. “There have been months I have gone through with zero donations.”

Even finding volunteers to look into the needs of poor children, including those belonging to refugee families, is proving to be difficult, said Fintan Ooi, a coordinator at a learning centre run by an NGO.

“In normal economic times, ordinary people could be called upon to help these children with their studies or to donate or ‘adopt them’ in terms of contributing financially to their educational and other needs,” Ooi said. “But in these slow economic times, even these volunteers themselves are more preoccupied with their own families’ economic problems.”

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on the impact of the global economic crisis on children and young people, in partnership with UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific.)

Even if Prime Minister Najib Razak is in Copenhagen for the high-level segment of the U.N. conference on climate change, there has been precious little meaningful debate on the subject here in Malaysia.

Few Malaysians really understand the issues at stake, in part due to the lack of much meaningful analysis in the media apart from the odd commentary.

Not many politicians, whether from the ruling coalition or opposition ranks, have also really discussed climate change and its impact on this South-east Asian country, and put it in the public domain.

Government-controlled television and newspapers have in the main relied on video clips and press reports from the foreign media and western news agencies. These are usually tucked away in world news sections, unless something dramatic happens like the mass arrests of demonstrators in Copenhagen.

The Malaysian public has largely remained in the dark or unconcerned over the issues involved. Only 35 percent — down from 52 percent in 2008 — of Malaysians agreed that ”climate change and how we respond to it are among the biggest issues they worry about today”, according to a Climate Confidence Monitor 2009 survey conducted by Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp. Two thirds, however, think a new global deal is important.

But the major factor behind the lack of focus of climate change issues in the country is its geographical position, since Malaysia lies in an area thus far spared from extreme weather events, suggests Anthony Tan, executive director of the Centre for Environment, Technology and Development (Cetdem).

”The weather is a bit more unpredictable now, but we haven’t been shocked into the reality of climate change. There is no extreme drought though there are floods, but those seem to be on a yearly basis. This is unlike the situation in the Pacific islands, where they are worried about rising sea levels.”

Cetdem is an independent non-profit group committed to improving environmental quality by promoting the appropriate use of technology and sustainable development. It is part of a Malaysian climate change steering committee comprising government departments and agencies. The committee, set up by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, meets twice a year.

From Copenhagen, the state news agency Bernama quoted Najib as saying that Malaysia believes that having developed countries do more to keep their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions is an issue of fairness. “This is based on the principle of fairness because they (developed countries) are the biggest contributors of carbon emissions,” he told Malaysian journalists there Friday after addressing the climate change conference.

As a developing nation, Malaysia has no quantitative commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Through the clean development mechanism under the Protocol, Malaysia can trade certified emission reductions in the international market.

Developing countries have insisted that the Kyoto Protocol should continue and that developed countries should slash their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent, compared to 1990 levels, by 2020.

But the developed nations do not want this without the United States on board. They also want developing nations to commit to cuts.

Developed nations have rejected this, wanting a second period of the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 and a so-called two-track approach. This would that see to it that the developed nations commit themselves to more cuts, the United States comes on board through a second track of similar commitments and developing nations agree to voluntary action supported by financial and technological aid.

Najib said Malaysia would have to do its part in addressing climate change. But he also said that the 10 billion U.S. dollar fast-track funding for developing nations to control their emissions, as discussed in the Copenhagen talks, is small compared to the accountability of developed nations.

Whether Malaysia indeed keeps to its own commitments remains to be seen.

Oil and gas, manufacturing, and oil palm products are major revenue earners at a time when Malaysia is expected to post its largest budget deficit in two decades at 7.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product. In eastern Sarawak state alone, Malaysia’s auditor-general noted in his 2008 report that close to a million hectares of permanent forest reserve had been lost between 1990 and 2008.

Malaysia recorded 187 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2006, according to U. N. Millennium Development Goal indicators. That puts it in third place in the South-east Asian region behind Indonesia (333 million tonnes) and Thailand (273 million tonnes), with Vietnam (106 million tonnes) in fourth place.

On a per capita basis, a different picture emerges. With 7.2 tonne of CO2 per capita, Malaysia is still the third highest emitter in South-east Asia. Brunei tops the list at 15.5 tonnes per capita, followed by Singapore with 12.8 tonnes. Thailand (4.3 tonnes) and Indonesia (1.5 tonnes) occupy fourth and fifth places respectively.

Malaysia’s rhetoric on climate change has to be seen against what actually takes place locally, given the balancing act the government needs to do between its eagerness to boost economic growth and also cater to investors’ interests as it drives the economy forward.

On Monday this week, as the Copenhagen summit moved into high gear before its scheduled end on Friday, Malaysian deputy youth and sports minister Wee Jeck Seng, representing the Prime Minister, unveiled the drivers for Malaysia’s new Team Lotus F1 that will debut in the coming season of high- octane, fuel-guzzling Formula One racing.

When organisers of an international conference on climate change and the food crisis first scheduled the event here for late September, little did they realise the event would be sandwiched by two typhoons buffeting the region. Ironically, the first typhoon, ‘Ketsana’, delayed the arrival of conference delegates from the Philippines.

A farmers' empowerment program in the Philippines enables farm folk to breed traditional seed varieties that can survive dry spells. Credit: MASIPAG

A week after Ketsana struck the Philippines on Sep. 26 and then Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, it was the turn of Typhoon Parma to wreak havoc in the Philippines on Oct. 3. Now downgraded to a tropical storm, ‘Parma’ is still lingering over the region and initially entangled with another Pacific super typhoon, ‘Melor’, which then headed towards Japan.

Ketsana left a devastating trail after it dumped the equivalent of one month’s rainfall over Manila within six hours. Although Parma largely spared the country, it flooded large tracts of rice fields in northern Philippines and destroyed crops ready for harvest.

The typhoons in the region brought into sharp relief the issue of climate change as farmers struggle to cope with changing weather patterns. It is not just the sudden storms and heavy rainfalls that are disrupting farming but also the blurring of the seasons.

“If it rains, it rains heavily. In the past, there was less rainfall in September and October, but now there are heavy rains and strong winds,” says Che Ani Mat Zain, a rice farmer in Kedah in northern Malaysia.

“Our yield is fine if the weather is okay, but not if it is unpredictable,” he observes, adding that December and January used to be fairly dry months in Kedah, but now farmers experience more rain.

That is a pattern of disorientation that is being felt across the region. “The dry season and wet seasons are now blurred,” concurs Dr Charito Medina, national coordinator for the Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development (or ‘MASIPAG’, its Filipino acronym), a Philippine-based organisation bringing together 642 farmer organisations, representing 35,000 farmers, 60 non- governmental organisations and 15 scientists.

“Farmers can’t rely on a dependable rainfall. For planting you need the soil to be wet, so that when you sow seeds, it will germinate,” he noted at the sidelines of the conference organised by the Pesticide Action Network’s Asia Pacific office on Sep. 27 to 29 in Penang.

Droughts and rainy periods seem to be longer and more intense now. “Typhoons are becoming stronger and more frequent, and strong winds may damage crops, which could cause 100 percent damage,” he told IPS days before Typhoon Parma struck.

Unpredictable rainfall can disrupt the rice-planting season. If the rain stops for two weeks, there is crop failure and farmers have to replant. But they may not have any more seeds and may need to buy more from agricultural suppliers, which they may not be able to afford, points out Medina.

In Indonesia, Erpan Faryadie, secretary-general of the Alliance of Agrarian Reform Movement (or AGRA), a national peasants’ organisation representing 40,000 landless peasants, farmers and agricultural workers, sees a similar dismal pattern.

Droughts and floods have become more noticeable in the last decade, after swathes of Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi were heavily deforested and converted to monoculture farming. More floods have been seen in these provinces, which rarely happened before, notes Faryadie.

The situation in Java, which accounts for more than half of national rice production and where forests were lost much earlier, is more pronounced. During the rainy season, rice fields and agricultural lands in north Java are sometimes flooded. “The Green Revolution rice strains couldn’t withstand the flooding, and the farmers couldn’t get their harvests after the flooding,” he says.

The Green Revolution, a program begun in 1960s to avert a global food crisis, is based on the use of high-yielding seed varieties using modern inputs of fertilizers and pesticides.

“The biggest problem was the destruction of traditional farming, which was enough for farmers’ subsistence and national sufficiency if they used traditional varieties,” he laments, pointing out that some of the traditional rice seeds are more resistant to drought and heavy rains, with stalks still standing after floods.

The blurring of seasons has also hit farmers in the mountains of the Central Himalayas, where the predictable climate previously ensured food security. But summer this year produced record temperatures, as the Henwal stream dried up over a two-kilometre stretch for the first time in living memory. The droughts persisted even during the monsoon season, disrupting the planting cycle.

Meanwhile, the Gangroti Glacier, the source of the Ganga River in Uttarkashi district of Garhwal Himalaya, continues to retreat by 15 to 20 metres a year. Some farmers are now trying to adapt to climate change by taking another look at traditional seeds and farming practices.

MASIPAG in the Philippines adopts a “farmers’ empowerment” approach: it encourages farmers to collect, breed and select such traditional varieties of seeds to produce organic food.

Farmers carry out experiments themselves, with up to 50 varieties planted side-by-side in trial farms, measuring 600 to 800 square metres. Traditional seed varieties are selected as they are the most adaptable, the products of selection over time. These are then collected and improved through breeding and selection.

Some traditional varieties can survive dry spells better; others are more resistant to pest and diseases, which are themselves influenced by climate change. For instance, greater humidity and moisture result in more microorganisms, which can cause diseases, whereas a prolonged dry season could lead to more insect pests.

Each organisation comprising the farmers’ network then selects the top 10 varieties for the locality under organic conditions — with zero chemical inputs — and these are distributed by the members among themselves.

“(These trials determine) the survival of the fittest (among traditional varieties),” says Medina. “In contrast, conventional agriculture creates the ideal environment by using expensive chemical inputs.”

MASIPAG also promotes a diversified and integrated farming system. Farmers are encouraged to plant other crops such as tubers, which are more resistant to environmental changes because the edible portion lies below the surface of the soil. Cassava, sweet potato and cooking banana are also planted as “survival crops to fill the stomach”. Biomass is composted for use as organic fertilizers.

Native chickens are reared, and these are regarded as “ATMs in the backyard”: if there is a typhoon, chickens can be sold in the market to raise emergency funds to buy supplies. “You can withdraw (from these ‘ATMs’ when you need it,” quips Medina. Similarly, goats and cows, which convert weed into food and produce manure for the farm, can be sold during emergencies.

Such initiatives are precisely what may be needed. A new report published by GRAIN , an international group working to support community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, shows that more sustainable agriculture can put much of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back into the soil.

Evidence in the report shows that industrial agriculture, and the global food system of which it is part, has sent large amounts of this carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, the group said in a press release.

And calculations reveal that policies supporting small farmer-centred agriculture, which also focuses on restoring soil fertility, would play a big role in resolving the worsening climate crisis. “In 50 years the soils could capture about 450 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is more than two thirds of the current excess in the atmosphere,” says the report.

But that is only if agricultural sovereignty is returned to millions of small farmers and farming communities, and policies are formulated to support their livelihoods.

“The evidence is irrefutable. If we can change the way we farm and the way we produce and distribute food, then we have a powerful solution for combating the climate crisis. There are no technical hurdles to achieving these results, it is only a matter of political will, says GRAIN coordinator Henk Hobbelink.

*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS – Inter Press Service and IFEJ – International Federation of Environmental Journalists, for the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org).