Sarawak State Land Development Minister James Masing says Native Customary Rights land development has raised the socio-economic status of rural farmers – but the figures show a different picture.
Check out the figures from the Malaysian Mirror:
He said that as at March 31 this year, joint-venture agreements for 30 NCR land development projects covering a total gross area of 275,926 hectares were executed in various phases of development.
At present 6,428 landowners had received a total of RM5.1mil from actual dividend and cash incentives disbursed by nine projects for 37,574 hectares of NCR land. This was in addition to cash incentives of RM1.7mil paid to NCR land development project participants in Kanowit, he said.
Let’s do the maths: RM5.1 million dividends divided by 6,428 participants gives them a mere RM793 dividends per participant for the use of 37,574 hectares of land. At RM793 per year, this means the Iban participants only got RM66 per month for use of their land by the big plantation companies.
The dividend of RM5.1 million also works out to RM136 per hectare.
Assuming the raw figures in the Malaysian Mirror were accurately reported – now you tell me, is this a fair partnership with the Ibans or outright criminal exploitation?
Masing should know better than to spew out drivel about how profitable NCR land development is for natives. (If it is so profitable for them, why are so many protesting?) After all, he did his Phd in the anthropology of the Iban, “The coming of the gods: a study of an invocatory chant (Timang Gawai Amat) of the Iban of the Baleh River region of Sarawak.“
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Who are you? Working on simple maths to try to solve land utility problems?
The only way to get a ‘fair’ math out of it, may be to calculate:
What did they get out of the land before development, and what did they get after?
Did they loose cultivated land that gave a bigger income or did they in fact get an additional income from non-utilized land?
One has to be fair to both parties.
Phd or what have you, when a person talked with hidden agenda …, whatever that spewed from the mouth can be devoid of any semblance of logic or conscience, as history will provide endless list of so called champions of their races and religions.