How many felda settlers

Federal Land Development Authority FELDA was established on July 1, under the Land Development Ordinance of for the development of land and relocation with the objective of poverty eradication through the cultivation of oil palm and rubber. The FELDA function is to carry out projects of land development and agricultural activities, industrial and commercial social economy.

It is located close to the clinic and this enables the midwife to call for an ambulance from town in case of an emergency. It can also be used by settlers and is a further means of communication with the outside world.

Communication with the rest of the country and the outside world in general is also achieved via the national radio and television network; all settlers own a radio and a TV set. Moreover, a sizeable proportion of the male settlers is literate and quite a few of them read a Malay daily newspaper. Bearing in mind the above picture of the scheme organization and regional integration, we can now turn to a general evaluation of the settlers as a community. Asking whether FELDA settlers are still part of the Malay peasantry implies a preliminary question concerning our definition of the word peasant.

Although it might be useful to review the various meanings the word peasant has been endowed with since the category emerged as a possible subject of analysis in the first half of the nineteenth century-social scientists who specialize in so-called peasant studies indulge in such periodic updating,9 or, as one of them put it, in "conceptualizing and deconceptualizing" Shanin -such is not the purpose of this paper.

I will only draw upon such sources to outline briefly my own position. Peasants are sometimes defined in terms of occupational and economic qualifications. De Koninck, for one, regards them as "small scale family based agricultural producers" , Yet such a definition fails to convey cultural and political dimensions. As to Wolf's definition, I find it unsatisfactory for other reasons;10 while conveying, although implicitly, cultural and political dimensions, it is too restrictive in economic and occupational terms; not only does Wolf exclude non-agriculturalists such as fishermen but he also keeps out of the peasant category two groups of people who work on the land, the landless labourers and those "who participate fully in the market" Wolf , Yet I still find inadequacies in Shanin's definition, and more precisely with the second item.

I think one can no longer stick to a subsistence orientation and, following de Koninck , one should broaden it to include both commercial and subsistence orientations.

Moreover, I find Shanin's occupational specificity too narrow, and, following Firth , in order to give proper place to the social and cultural dimensions, I feel one should include among peasants other rural dwellers such as fishermen and craftsmen; it is because peasants constitute and belong to a living community that one cannot admit the exclusion of such non-agricultural occupations.

Further, as Firth rightly argued, such clear-cut categories do not always exist in practice, at least not in the Malaysian context Firth , To sum up, one would argue that peasants share a family based economic tie with a village territory, from which most of them derive the main part of their livelihood. They are part of a specific village culture, and they occupy a subordinate social position within a state structure. At the same time, they form a political force that has to be reckoned with.

Expressed in such encompassing terms, this definition fits the Malaysian peasantry. It seems to have been taken for granted by most observers of Malay society, as the phrase "Malay peasants" is taken to be synonymous with "Malay villagers," in the anthropological literature at least.

The importance thus granted to the cultural factors the fact that Malay peasants are part of both a village culture and a village community justifies the above discussion, which would otherwise appear as mere theoretical juggling.

In attempting to determine whether FELDA settlers are peasants, one ought to go through the literature written by social scientists on the Malay peasantry on the one hand and that dealing with FELDA settlers on the other. It is interesting to note that neither body even raises the labelling issue; studies dealing with the Malay peasantry do not mention FELDA settlers in one way or another Firth ; Fatimah Halim ; Wan Hashim ; Zawawi De Koninck is the only author who clearly takes sides by including FELDA settlers among Malay peasants de Koninck ,'4 while Zulkifly's position is ambiguous; he implicitly treats them as a distinct category when he writes about "the peasantry and the smallholder sector" Zulkifly , , yet his smallholder sector includes the village rubber smallholders.

In my view, the latter cannot be regarded as distinct from peasants, while the land tenure system in FELDA schemes makes equating settlers with village smallholders debatable. Malay peasants. The next step towards answering the initial question involves the processing of our own ethnographic data in the light of the four dimensional definition outlined above.

To start with, the first criterion as expressed by Shanin , 14 , "the family farm as the basic unit of multi-dimensional social organization," poses problems.

In FELDA schemes, while the nuclear family does represent the basic social and residential unit, it does not act as a working unit, at least in oil palm schemes; the male settler is the main, if not the only, producer as women are physically unable to handle the fruit bunches, which can weigh up to 50 kilos or even more. Besides, as stated earlier, the income generated by the settler's labour is not directly proportional to the latter because of the block system that treats income and production on a team basis.

In the same way, while each settler is meant to work within the limits of a particular piece of land," it would be difficult to regard this as "family land," not only because-during the period of repayment of the loan at least-the relationship to the land is closer to share tenancy than to a full ownership right but because such land has neither been transmitted via kinship ties nor been bought from a known individual; neither has it been gained from the forest by the personal efforts of the settler himself.

Put another way, the legal relationship that ties the settler to the land is mediated via FELDA, whereas in a Malay village community the land either belongs to the cultivator himself or to some person whom he knows; the mediator is not an anonymous entity. The occupational criterion that is part of the definition of peasantry being rather flexible, it still applies to FELDA settlers' work; although specialized to the extreme, work in the scheme is clearly agricultural. However, questions emerge when one considers the identification of peasants with a traditional culture which includes a village community.

One of the decisive factors of Malay village culture is a pattern of residence organized along kinship ties and according to a specific perception of the natural environment e. In FELDA schemes, the residential organization has no social basis, and the actual location has nothing to do with the people's worldview.

Malay culture plays no part in the location of dwellings in relation to each other or in relation to the natural environment. Further-and here we come back to land to make a basic point-even though such was not the case before the advent of British colonialism, land is a commodity in a Malay village, and, if one may say so, it is a "living" commodity.

It has both a historical and a socio-economic value. It has a historical value in the sense that the cultivated territory as a whole tells the story of a settlement process for a given community, and each particular lot tells the story of a long line of individuals, of their efforts, their failures, and other biological data, such as the number of their dependents, etc.

Moreover, land has socio-economic aspects because it can and does circulate; it can be divided, taken away, accumulated, or rented, and as such it is a medium of communication between villagers, a medium that is ruled by a complex host of social forces including customary law. In FELDA schemes, land is allocated on an individual basis, but even when the loan has been totally repaid,20 it never becomes private property as it does in a village.

A Felda Federal Land Development Authority settler now for 30 years, his poor background had been key to his eligibility for land ownership. Prior to that, he was working as a labourer at a Felda mill in Trolak, taking home a monthly income of about RM, and to better support his family, he became a part-time religious teacher and a mosque leader imam in the evenings. Time For Change. Natural rubber was first cultivated as the core crop, and he received 4.

This, and the fact that rubber can only be planted, at most, twice before the soil would have been fully optimised, opened a pathway for oil palm to be introduced. Mohd Hussin says he was not afraid of giving the new crop a try when the officers came to ask him to convert his rubber tree plantation. Today, he takes home a monthly income of at least RM1,, thanks to the solid demand and high prices fetched from the fruit. It is estimated that a 4. About 10 years ago, Felda appointed Felda Technoplant as its management agency to manage the estates as well as to replant the trees as a lessee on behalf of the settlers, which means they need no longer toil on their lands.

The Felda scheme works in a way that in the first three years of planting before the trees mature , each settler receives an advanced livelihood wage of RM1, monthly. It will take about 10 years or more for Felda to break-even with the palm oil returns, and at this stage, whatever monies that were paid to the settlers over the years would be offset through small monthly deductions.

Generational Support. For example, our wooden house here has been upgraded to this brick one with a RM20, interest-free housing loan from Felda. After harvesting just a few bunches of oil palm fruits, the duo heads home. My dad harvests maybe twice a month. Azmi is also grateful he was sent to study in a Chinese primary school as that exposed him to races other than his own. He lamented that most settlers and their families know little of other races, and hence tend to be apprehensive and even prejudiced against others.

He advised dad to send me to Chinese school. Kini Lens. Kini Morning Brief.