Colony of North Borneo annual report.

  • North Borneo.
Date:
[1961]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Colony of North Borneo annual report. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    74/298 (page 52)
    the Dusuns and Lundayas of the Interior, that given forceful leadership and Government assistance hill natives are willing to adopt a more settled form of agriculture. Land development at the local level is handled by Land Utilisation Committees which have now been set up in all dis¬ tricts. These committees, on which all interested Government departments are represented, ensure that land development is properly planned in the early stages and that land is put to the best possible use. District Land Utilisation Committees are subject to general direction by the Natural Resources Committee, which met once during the course of the year. Land Settlement In Keningau where the majority of the settlers are hill Dusuns who previously practised shifting cultivation over 500 settlers have now been established on ten-acre rubber lots and on wet padi lots. Six more miles of road were built and four and a half miles of irrigation canal completed. In July, a pilot scheme was approved for the resettlement of fifty families from the West Coast and Interior on fertile volcanic soils on the Apas river near Tawau. A reception centre with ac¬ commodation for twelve families and a primary school were erected, fifteen-acre holdings surveyed and three acres of each cleared before the first settlers arrived. By the end of the year nineteen families (eight Dusun and eleven Chinese) were in resi¬ dence and had harvested their first catch crops of maize, padi and vegetables and were embarking on further clearing. $365,000 (ninety per cent from Colonial Development and Welfare Funds) has been provided for this pilot scheme, which includes provision for a small agricultural station. Assistance given to settlers includes the cost of transport, house materials, a monthly maintenance grant for the first two years and the issue of tools, planting materials and livestock. As a result of the successful air survey of land applications in Kudat district in 1960, a second operation was undertaken at Tambunan and Apin-Apin in the Interior using a Wild RC8 camera. 1,402 land applications at Tambunan and 494 at Apin- Apin were surveyed in this manner. North Borneo is the first country in South East Asia to adopt this technique of surveying land titles by aerial photography, which should help to reduce con¬ siderably the arrears of land applications awaiting survey. Elsewhere survey staff were fully occupied in dealing with arrears of land applications. During the year 5,860 land applica¬ tions covering 67,056 acres were surveyed, most of them for high yielding rubber. The number of applications for land awaiting survey at the end of the year was 16,586, which shows a reduc¬ tion of 1,250 on the corresponding figure for 1960.