Friday, January 22

Plant oil palm in your own land, owners advised

Sarawak Native Land Owners Network has warned NCR landowners not to allow their land to be developed through Land Custody and Development Authority.

Nicholas Mujah who sits as an adviser of the board of Sarawak Native Land Owners Network said that land owners have bitter experience in dealing with LCDA.

“All the disputed cases between the natives and LCDA are due to the fact that LCDA is not transparent in its policies.

“Let us look at all the court cases pending in the High Court which have been triggered by the LCDA’s lack of transparency policies,”
he said, giving an example of land owners in Kanowit who are forced to take legal action against LCDA, which they alleged, has failed to protect their interests.

Although LCDA promised to pay dividends to the scheme participants in Kanowit after four years or so of operations, the natives until now have not been paid any dividend by the company that was developing their land more than 10 years ago.

“There are more cases of this nature coming up in the Court in the next few months” he said.

Mujah, who is Secretary General of Sarawak Dayak Iban Association (SADIA), was commenting on Taib’s statement regarding government’s intention to introduce a new land development scheme in order to enable the natives to earn bigger incomes through the development of their NCR land.

Taib had said that among the ideas being mulled was to create estate share exchange which would be handled by LCDA and with this kind of scheme to be implemented within the next 10 years, the people in the rural areas would feel reasonably comfortable with their earnings.

Mujah suggested that it is better for the land owners to develop or plant their own land with oil palm as they would gain much better profits than through a joint-venture with LCDA or even Salcra.

Most land owners receive between RM300 and RM1,000 per year in JV with companies and LCDA (Pelita) where as if they plant oil palm on their own land, they will earn at least RM1,000 a month or about RM12,000 a year.

He said there are examples of smallholders who are very successful in their undertakings such as David Kalom, Cobbold John, Tuai Rumah Masa and Jawah Gerang to name a few.

According to Mujah, each one of them earned between RM10,000 and RM20,000 a month.

He also advised land owners to seek advice from those who have been successful as well as from the Malaysian Oil Palm Board. - The Broken Shield

Source: www.thebrokenshield.blogspot.com

2 comments:

Suntat said...

LCDA - Let chase dayak away....so that we can snatch their land!!!

Anonymous said...

All this happen not becos LCDA can do what they like.This only can be done becos the dayaks are not clever enough to negotiate with LCDA. They should in the first place engage a good lawyer to do it on their behalf. If all these have gone through good lawyers, then I think today the dayaks would have got their share.

By now the dayaks should have got wind of the LCDA dirty tactics.Dayaks cannot depend on their leaders to help them to negotiate this deal on their behalf. Everytime when there is a JV ,these dayak leaders will try to act as if they are the one who can close the deal with the company. After sealing the deal and pocketing the commission, they don't care what will happen next with this deal. If the deal turn sour, they will just ignore it.

I have heard of another deal in the coming near Sarikei.It's between LCDA and the towkays. As far as I know, the dayaks are more than willing to go into this JV becos this 'agent' have told them a convincing story that they will prosper if they go into this JV.So you see who is the willing partner.

Another thing is that, dayaks are not very capable of setting up their own farm becos they don't know the maths of managing this farm.Also financial problem is the main culprit.

I still think planting vegetables and fruits is a better way, even though it's less profitable but it's easy to manage.It's better to own it yourself than to be share by the devil.