Agriculture, Tan Sri Dr. Chan has called on all the 28 Area Farmers
Organisation (AFOs) to establish a land bank database.
He said this when officiating at the 20th Annual General Meeting Of State Farmer’s Ogranisation, Sarawak in Kuching.
He considered it vital for the SFO to have ready
information on land of respective AFOs areas so that the Sarawak
Farmers Organisation (SFO) could facilitate the consolidation of
individual member’s land of economical sizes into economic size for
more viable commercial agriculture projects.
Tan Sri Dr. Chan said that he would not want to get
a negative response from AFOs whenever he enquire if a certain piece of
land is a State land or Native land
And he mentioned that the AFOs must take stock of
individual members’ resources or assets,hence the important of having
such a database.
Dr.Chan, also said that such database must contain
relevant information such as the location,size,land suitability and
status of the land to make it easier to gauge the availability of the
AFO members’ land available for relevance agricultural or commercial
development.
“It is through this approach that modernized agricultural projects can be implemented expeditiously,”he stressed.
The 28 AFOs in Sarawak represent 147,000 farming
communities who are also their registered members. The
Farmers’Organisation was set up in the Department of Agriculture in
1972 with the establishment of its first Area Farmers’ Organisation
(AFO) at Stumbin in 1973. Since then,28 AFOs have been established.
Literally they are formed by the farmers for the
farmers, and their operations are overseen by their respective board of
directors who comprise the farmers themselves. SFO meanwhile is the
umbrella body for all the AFOs.
