The Ministry of Modernisation of Agriculture, Native Land and Regional Development has proposed a leasing model for native land development and will be presenting it to the State Cabinet soon. Deputy Chief Minister, Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas, who is the Minister of Modernisation of Agriculture, Native Land and Regional Development, revealed this yesterday in his winding up speech in the State Legislative Assembly in Kuching.
“Based on the experience in the implementation of Joint-Venture Model under the New NCR Land Development Concept introduced in 1995 and revised in 2015, we need to improve further the current model and also provide an alternative model to the NCR landowners,” he said.
Stressing that native land development would continue to be an important agenda for agriculture and rural development in Sarawak, Uggah revealed that the total NCR land areas approved for survey were 1.2 million hectares.
“The total areas that have been perimeter surveyed are 804,826 hectares. Out of this, 643,017 hectares have been successfully gazetted as Native Communal Reserved under Section 6 of the State Land Code. “Out of the land gazetted under Section 6, a total of 17,776 hectares have been issued with land titles under Section 18 of the State Land Code involving 15,351 lots,” he said.
On moves to revitalise the rubber Industry in Sarawak, Uggah said natural rubber remained an important industry in the Malaysian economy in terms of its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product, export earnings and employment for a large number of smallholders.
He said while research and development activities had been intensified to enhance the competitive position and production efficiency of natural rubber in the country, the smallholding sector at large continued to lag behind in terms of productivity and quality of raw rubber produced. In Sarawak, he said the natural rubber industry was largely dominated by smallholders with holdings scattered throughout the state.
“Currently, the planted areas amounted to 160,449 hectares. The export value for rubber products in Sarawak declined from RM265.7 million in 2012 to only RM114.0 million in 2014. “There are good prospects for the natural rubber industry in Sarawak. At the moment, Malaysia is importing 318,419 metric tonnes of concentrate latex from Thailand to support rubber-based industry in the country. “Thus, this will offer new opportunity for Sarawak to produce latex concentrate in order to reduce imports of latex to Malaysia,” he said.
Uggah added that the other product of the rubber industry was rubber wood which could be used to produce wood-based products such as furniture, building and interior decoration materials. “This will be our prelude to attract private sector investment in rubber-based industry to Sarawak,” he said. The state, he pointed out, had vast areas of land including Native Customary Rights (NCR) land that could be developed for the commercial planting of rubber. “Sarawak is the last frontier for rubber industry development in the country,” he added.
To spearhead the development of the natural rubber industry in the state, Uggah proposed that a full-fledged authority be established. “The authority will ensure a dynamic and sustainable development of the rubber industry in Sarawak.
“Currently, we have the Rubber Fund Committee established under the Rubber Ordinance, 1958 which is not able to cope with the development in the rubber industry. “In this connection, my Ministry through the Depar tment of Agriculture will carry out digital mapping of targeted potential NCR areas to be developed for large scale rubber plantation,” added Uggah.
