50 American-Eurasian Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 7(2): 50-53, 2013 ISSN 1995-0748 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Corresponding Author: Nasruddin Hassan, School of Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology UniversitiKebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor DE, Malaysia E-mail: nas@ukm.my A Goal Programming Approach for Rubber Production in Malaysia Nasruddin Hassan, Hazwa Hanim Mohamed Hamzah, Siti Maisarah Md Zain School of Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor DE, Malaysia Nasruddin Hassan, Hazwa Hanim Mohamed Hamzah, Siti Maisarah Md Zain: A Goal Programming Approach for Rubber Production in Malaysia ABSTRACT Rubber industry is one of the main contributors to Malaysia’s economic growth. Rubber estates and smallholdings are major sources of rubber production in Malaysia. Rubber estates are the focus of this study as private contributors involved in the development of the rubber. A study was conducted to maximize rubber production and planted areas of rubber by using the goal programming approach. This approach has been taken to find the optimal solution to the problem. Key words: Goal programming;optimal solution; rubber plantations Introduction Rubber industry is one of the most important economic crops in Malaysia since 1970s. Malaysia was the largest producer of rubber in the world until late 1980’s(Balsiger et al., 2000). Indonesia then took over as the biggest rubber cultivator in the world followed by Thailand (Ratnasingam et al., 2011). Even though export of natural rubber has been inconsistent but it is still one of the biggest contributors for Malaysian economy. Due to the development of industrial technologies, rubber plantation plays a new role to provide raw material for rubber based product and also for product made of rubber wood (Rafain et al., 2012). In the interval of 2000 to 2010,Malaysia produced the most natural rubber in 2006, which is believed due to the advance in rubber industries technologies and rise in the price of rubber. However, the production decreased after 2006 due to dwindling demands of rubber during the global economic crisis.As in October 2012, the production of rubber decreased by 2.6% compared to the previous year (Department of Statistics, 2012). One of the factors that result in the decrement of the production isthe decrement in the rubber plantation area. Hence, the authorities are promoting the optimization of land for rubber plantation in order to increase the production of rubber since rubber industry is still one of the biggest contributors to the country’s economy. The planted areas for rubber are operated by smallholders and estates. The number of estates in the country has been decreasing which in turn cause the planted area to continue its downtrend. In 2009, the total production of natural rubber fell 340,638 tonnes (-28.4%) to 857,562 tonnes compared to 198200 tonnes in 2007 (Department of Statistics, 2010). Goal programming is one of the models which have been developed to deal with the multiple objectives decision-making problems (Sen and Nandi, 2012b). The increasing popularity of goal programming and usefulness for decision-making policies has been aimed at optimizing agricultural land and other natural resources (Senand Nandi, 2012a; Hassan and Mohammad Basir, 2009; Hassan and Sahrin, 2012; Hassan and Abdul Halim, 2012; Hassan and Ayop, 2012; Hassan and Loon, 2012; Hassan et al., 2012a; Hassan et al., 2012b). Goal programming approach has been proposed for production optimization a few times previously. Leung and Ng (2007) used a preemptive goal programming model for production planning where three objectives are optimized hierarchically. Nja and Udofia (2009) formulated mixed-integer goal programming model for a flour producing company based on production times of three products. Kopanos et al. (2011) also developed a mixed discrete/continuous-time mixed-integer linear programming model for resource-constrained production planning in semicontinuousfood industries. Sen and Nandi (2012a) proposed a goal programming approach for rubber plantation planning in 7 years by taking into consideration on the number of tree survived within the time span, expenditure and fertilizer used. This paper discussed on suggestion to increase rubber production based on the increment of the area of rubber trees planted in estates for different states in Malaysia.