By Datuk Stan Yee

Sabah’s Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Seri Panglima Yahya Hussin said recently that the state’s total paddy area has dwindled from 300,000 hectares to a mere 50,000 hectares. He could perhaps add that much of what remains is not cultivated either.

If the minister’s remark signals a rising concern over Sabah’s low grain production and serious lack of food security it has come not a moment too soon, even though his main focus appears to be on the conversion in increasing numbers of Native Titles (NT) to Country Leases (CL) on the fringes of urban areas.

Sabah’s paddy land is largely under NT made up of small unproductive rice fields criss-crossed by the traditional bunds that hold rainwater and usually also demarcate ownership boundaries. Some of these fields are in close proximity to urban areas. Many are left uncultivated while awaiting a change of the land use clause and other title conditions before being sold for housing, commercial or other development purposes.

The process usually involves a conversion from the more restrictive NT to CL, which permits unrestricted buying and selling. There are many reasons why rice cultivation has been neglected to such an alarming degree. Perhaps it is a price that we pay for Sabah’s rapid pace of urbanisation, infrastructure development and the proliferation of suburbia around our towns, all of which make inroads into paddy areas.

This is inevitable as towns and villages grow. Perhaps we can also blame the lack of interest in rice cultivation on the state’s all-consuming love affair with oil palm, which has pre-empted the bulk of the state’s arable land. The loss of NT to CL (if one can call it a loss) is minute by comparison.

If the Agriculture Minister’s recent statement indicates the government’s serious intent to preserve the remaining paddy fields, obviously any such move will have to be more strictly enforced than before, and risk fierce opposition from landowners. Preserving the rice fields will also stall the government’s development agenda that entails sacrificing some paddy land in the project areas.

It is a pity that the state’s paddy land is mostly under NT, which impedes commercial development, including large-scale mechanised farming.

For this and many other reasons the NT is considered to be anachronistic, a vestige of Sabah’s colonial past, even though it might have served its purpose in the early days of Sabah’s history.

This form of land ownership, or variant thereof, was a kind of safeguard the British administration put in place to ensure that the natives would not become landless and dispossessed. A distinguishing feature of the NT in its original form is the express provision to forbid any land transaction between native and non-native. Much of this prohibition still applies today even though it has been modified somewhat by an amendment during the PBS administration to permit the leasing of NT land to non-native for a period of time. This amendment gives native landowners some leeway in managing their landed assets. It makes good sense, although much maligned at first.

Perhaps a point to note is that the British did not create the NT solely to safeguard the natives from the land-hungry immigrant settlers.

If it was indeed their intention to pursue a divide and rule policy, what better way to accomplish this than through such a provision in the land law to keep the races apart!

The Director of Lands and Survey spoke recently about formulating a policy on NT. This is timely. While the government is at it, perhaps it should also take another look at the NT rationale and the title conditions in their present form. What purpose does the NT really serve in this day and age? While its primary aim was to prevent the transfer of native land to non-native, it does not prevent the transfer to another native.

There are now many well-to-do natives who would snap up land from other natives, more often than not, on the cheap. If the original intention as envisaged by the British was to safeguard the native landowner from being dispossessed by, say, a Chinese, would the native be less displaced if he sold his land to another native?

On the broader, socioeconomic scale, it should be pointed out that the NT is not a factor of Article 153 of the federal constitution as it applies to the natives of the Borneo states; it is not related to the New Economic Policy or its later version, the Bumiputra Economic Empowerment Agenda, and it is not in any way a function of the state constitution where it prescribes privileges for the natives.

As a vestige of colonial legislation the NT seems to have outlived its original raison d’tre and serves no useful purpose now except to restrict transferability and land use. As it necessarily limits commercial circulation it renders the land less valuable than similar land under CL.

On the political and social front, it segregates the natives from the non-natives, which is incompatible with the idea of nationhood, ethnic integration and, if you like, the 1Malaysia concept.

Many natives now see the paternalistic rationale inherent in the NT, which seems to suggest that the natives must be restricted by legislation whether to sell or not to sell their land, and to whom.

As for rice cultivation, Sabah has long since ceased to depend on the little rice fields scattered around the countryside to feed its population, not that it ever did to any significant extent. Successive state administrations have talked about self-sufficiency for as long as I can remember.

If Sabah ever had 300,000 hectares of fully cultivated paddy land we would have been self-sufficient in rice a long time ago.

Currently the state has targeted 60 percent self-sufficiency, against which Sabah’s rice output barely touches 30 per cent, leaving the huge shortfall to be met by import from Vietnam, Thailand and other sources.

Obviously we must take proactive steps to increase rice production to ward off possible food shortages, a risk not inconceivable given the erratic weather pattern brought on by climate change. However, I do not consider trying to coax more rice out of the little rice plots on the outskirts of towns as a proactive option. What we should do instead is to reorientate our agriculture priorities, which are currently heavily biased towards plantation crops such as oil palm and rubber.

The imbalance is too glaring for comfort. According to official figures, oil palm took up some 1.5 million hectares of Sabah’s agricultural land.

That was some years ago. No doubt more acreages have come under oil palm since. To that we must add large areas planted with rubber, which is encouraged by the government’s very generous starting grants.

According to some sources, food crops occupy roughly 60,000 hectares (less than 5 percent of agricultural land). Chief Minister Datuk Seri Panglima Musa Aman once said that it was the state government’s policy to require each of the plantation companies that have been alienated land to devote at least 10 percent of the total area for food-based production.

To meet the self-sufficiency aim the state government should apply more pressure on these plantation owners to set aside the 10 percent area suitable for food crop cultivation, and see to it that they plant up the area with approved food crops.

Of course, where appropriate, the government should also apply similar pressure on owners of existing paddy land in Sabah’s hinterland.

Despite the well-developed irrigation canals in some areas a great many landowners are not cultivating their fields even in districts like Kota Belud and Papar that were once regarded as Sabah’s “rice bowls”.

Kota Belud has about 10,000 hectares of rice fields many of which are well irrigated. In addition, paddy farmers receive all manner of assistance to encourage them to cultivate their land, sadly to no avail.

Clearly, we cannot rely on the existing paddy areas to meet the self-sufficiency target. We need to identify large areas suitable for irrigation and mechanised farming and designate these areas for rice cultivation on a commercial scale. There have been talks about opening up new areas for commercial rice farms, especially on the east coast areas of Sabah such as Trusan Sapi, and hill rice cultivation too as a possible option.

Unfortunately, such areas may have already come under the ubiquitous oil palm.

To make any headway with rice cultivation we must imbue the right kind of attitude in our young. Every now and again we hear our leaders extol the virtues of engaging in agriculture. Unfortunately, these words mean little to young people brought up in an education system that idolises a life of ease in air-conditioned comfort. With increasing emphasis on formal education, fewer and fewer aspire to work on the farm, which is seen as backward, hard labour and not very profitable. Modern farming together with the promise of reasonable return may be the only way to entice our youth to farming with a new attitude that sees agriculture as a respectable, rewarding and profitable profession rather than drudgery and a dead end.

As things are at the present time, NT landowners on the fringes of town are faced with a temptation they find hard to resist.

Given the hugely inflated prices of land they are not likely to grow rice on what seems like a gold mine in their possession, even if its value is curtailed somewhat by its NT status. This means there is no stopping more rice fields being sold and forming part of the urban sprawl.