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Examining The Effect of Relationship Marketing on The Small Farmers' Social, Economic, And Environmental Sustainability Performance

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Agriculture sustainability has been highlighted as a solution to global issues of food security, poverty, unemployment, and other sustainability issues. Small farmers are been identified as an agent in achieving the sustainable agriculture needed to remain competitive in the market by addressing their relationship marketing strategy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of trust and commitment in relationship marketing on the small farmer's sustainability performance specifically in economic, social, and environmental performance. Trust and commitment have been used in some previous studies but were not widely recognized as determinants of small farmers' triple-bottom-line sustainable performance. The quantitative approach has been adopted, in which questionnaires have been used to collect data. 160 samples were collected from the Sabah food crops small farmers. The results show that small farmer trust in relationship marketing is significant to their economic, social, and environmental sustainability performance. Meanwhile, a commitment was found not significant to the small farmer's sustainability performance, however, commitment is significant to the small farmer's economic sustainability performance. The results of this study contribute by giving new insight into developing the relationship marketing strategy for small farmers to sustain in regulating the food crops farm.
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