KUCHING: The second International Digital Economy Conference Sarawak (IDECS) 2018 has attracted a total of 2,379 delegates of both local and international.
Themed ‘Data to Fuel Economic Growth and Quality of Life’, the conference was officiated by Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi (Dr) Abang Johari Tun Openg at Borneo Convention Centre Kuching (BCCK) yesterday.
Earlier in his keynote address, the Chief Minister stressed it is important to ensure the state’s economy to grow. Thus, it is necessary for the private sectors to undertake major investment initiatives especially in the digital-related technologies and industries.
According to Abang Johari, the state needed at least RM2 to 3 billion of private investments a year to grow at a desired rate of five to six percent.
“The government’s investment of RM1 to 2 billion over several years (in physical infrastructure) is not sufficient to drive the growth of the Sarawak economy.
“We cannot anymore be too defensive over the Sarawak economy. Since the digital economy cuts across a large number of economic sectors, I will also ensure that clarity and transparency is evident in other sector of the economy, particularly, agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism-related industries,” he added.
Apart from that, Abang Johari also demanding the delegates to come up with innovative ways to make use of the ‘Big Data’ and benefit from its predictive insight and analysis.
Big Data, he said, refers to the collection and processing of sets of data with the three ‘Vs’ which are Volume, Variety and Velocity.
According to him, the data volume has to be large, which makes traditional data processing tools unable to handle the large volume such as each payment transactions in a country or movements of every vehicle in a city.
In addition, there should be variety, that is, the data structure, data format, data source and the complexity level have to show great diversity. For the third ‘V’, the velocity, merely means that the collection and processing of the data set has to be quick.
He cited the usage of Big Data in the agricultural industry whereby it will allow administration of precise quantity of fertilisers and water as well as setting of optimum temperature, humidity and light to the best possible breed of cultivated plants to produce the highest quality of agriculture products within the shortest time possible.
“Similarly, in the manufacturing sector, big data can be applied to improve production quality, minimize process error and product defects, enhance efficiency which will lead to production time and cost savings,” he added.
On another matter, the Chief Minister strongly stressed that the state have to increase its food production by at least five times in the next few years.
According to him, Sarawak is exporting RM1 billion worth of food products and importing almost RM4.6 billion worth of food products, of which the figure needed to be increased.
“To ensure the increase in food production, we need to change our farming style (by introducing new technology) as well as to build a complete supply chain farm to market and to develop the downstream activities in order to increase value-add and incomes.
“The challenge for our agriculture policy is to ensure that we have balance use of our limited arable land,” Abang Jo pointed out.
To increase the food productions, Abang Johari said the state is implementing the Food Basket programme in the Sarikei-Betong area where farmers are encourage to grow durians, bananas, pineapples, and coconuts and other fruits on a commercial basis.
“The Sarawak Government is accelerating the Food Basket programme by developing an area of 300 hectares in Sarikei for 30 young entrepreneurs,” he stress adding RM100 million has been set aside for existing farmers who need to scale up their farms with technology to improve their production efficiency.
Meanwhile, the two-day conference received participation from 12 countries namely Canada, Australia, Singapore, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Indonesia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe and others. 19 experts from various digital-related industries are also there to share their knowledge and experiences in various areas such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Data Science, Internet of Things (IoT), Smart City, start-ups and Digital Government.
Also present were Deputy Chief Ministers Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas, Tan Sri Datuk Amar Dr James Jemut Masing, Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hasan and State Secretary who is also the Organising Committee Chairman Tan Sri Datuk Amar Mohamad Morshidi Abdul Ghani.
