Transmenu powered by JoomlArt.com - Mambo Joomla Professional Templates Club

By Jack Wong

KUCHING: The Sarawak Dayak Iban Association (Sadia) has helped resolve about 100 land disputes between oil palm plantation developers and native customary right (NCR) landowners.

Its president Sidi Munan said the association provided free services to the landowners and that disputes were usually settled when the developers recognised the NCR claims and stayed away.

“In some instances, the developers and NCR landowners later became good friends. Several landowners have been employed by the developers to work in their projects,” he told The Star yesterday.

However, he said, there were “stubborn” developers who ignored the NCR claims and bulldozed native land.

“They argued that the natives did not have documents to prove their claims. On the other hand, they were granted leases by the government to go ahead with their projects.”

Munan said the association would refer unresolved disputes to lawyers if it found that the landowners were victimised.

As at last June, Sarawak had a total planted oil palm area of about 830,000ha, with the private sector contributing 78%. The state government’s target is to increase oil palm estates to one million hectares by the end of this year.

The government has approved some 720,000ha of NCR land for large-scale oil palm cultivation under the new development model that involves joint ventures between plantation companies and landowners, with the Land Custody Development Authority as the managing agent.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed