WARM WELCOME: Naroden (centre) welcoming Norkiah to his residence at Demak Heights as Salahuddin (third right) looks on.

12/08/2013 (Borneo Post) - Oil palm cultivation in Sarawak will be the catalyst to improve the socio-economic wellbeing of the people and to ensure that they too can achieve a high income by 2020.

Assistant Minister of Resource Planning Datuk Mohd Naroden Majais said now, people were willing to fight for any plot of land in their villages to plant oil palm.

“This shows that the state government’s policy to develop the native customary right (NCR) land through the new concept has been successful and all the hoo-ha created by the opposition is considered as an administrative matter,” Naroden told the media after receiving a courtesy call from Head of State Tun Datuk Patinggi Abang Muhammad Salahuddin and his wife Toh Puan Datuk Patinggi Norkiah at the former’s residence at Demak Heights here on Friday.

Naroden, who is Assistant Minister of Entrepreneur Development, said that in his constituency, some 80 per cent of the land has been cultivated with the golden crop.

“Most of the land in Gedong and Simunjan totalling some 40,000 hectares have been cultivated with oil palm. Most of this land is state land. But even NCR land owners were now willing to participate in oil palm cultivation through joint-venture which has benefited them a lot,” added Naroden.

Naroden, who is also Simunjan assemblyman, was optimistic that the cultivation of oil palm will lead the people to a better livelihood in future.

“Now there are some few hundreds of smallholders who are doing very well that (so much so) one of them, a tuai rumah from Kampung Sibau Rimbau, Semilatong, Simunjan could even afford to buy a 4WD in cash,” he said.

He said the income from oil palm cultivation follows the rule of thumb: such as, if one were to plant one hectare of it, he or she could expect a net income of RM1,000 per month upon its maturity.

Among the big names which have cultivated oil pam commercially in Simunjan are Tradewins, Rimbunan Hijau and Tabung Haji.

Meanwhile, Naroden said the federal government has allocated some RM110 million since 2010 for the state government to carry out perimeter survey works on the NCR land in Sarawak.

He hoped that the communal perimeter surveying works on the estimated 1.5 million hectares of NCR land could be completed by next year and thereafter, works could be carried out on individual land.