Evaluation on accessibility of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) among rice farmers in Wilayah IV, PPK Bukit Besar, Kedah / Muhammad Izzat Syafiq Ibrahim

In today’s age of modernization, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has played a very important role in the development of agriculture sector. This technology has brought a significant change in agriculture development where farmers can directly communicate with traders, government, buyers, and producers. However, due to lack of knowledge and information, farmers are not getting the benefits from these technologies. To understand this, a study was conducted to find out the level of accessibility of ICTs and determine the factors that influence the level of ICT accessibility among rice farmers. In this study, the data was obtained from 103 randomly selected farmers from PPK Bukit Besar, Kedah. A few factors were investigated to test this study which includes the usage factor, network factor, and socio-economic factor. The study was conducted using descriptive analysis and regression analysis. The result showed that the majority of the rice farmers owned ICT tools and mobile phone is the most owned ICT tools among others. Besides that, the result also showed that the majority of the rice farmers frequently use ICT tools to communicate with other rice farmers and share agriculture information with other rice farmers. In conclusion, all factors that contributed to the accessibility of ICT were significant and has a statistical relationship with the accessibility of ICT among rice farmers. Among all these factors, the usage factor has the highest significant influence on the accessibility of ICT, followed by the network factor and lastly, socio-economic factors which have the lowest significant influence.