PRESSURE is mounting on both the Sabah state government and Putrajaya as civil society groups, regional leaders, and native rights activists call for a complete re-examination of roughly 250,000 acres of land currently alienated to the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA).
The controversy centres on vast tracts of land in eastern Sabah,primarily around the Felda Sahabat complex in Lahad Datu.
Critics argue that the historical land allocations violated long-standing Native Customary Rights governed by the Sabah Land Ordinance.
“The original justification for handing over Sabah’s valuable land reserves to a federal agency was to eradicate rural poverty.
“Decades later, the reality is the exact opposite. While federal entities extracted massive wealth from Sabah’s agricultural soil, Sabah remains one of the poorest states in Malaysia, suffering from high poverty rates and widespread rural landlessness.
“Taking native land away from local communities did not solve poverty – it entrenched it by stripping Sabahans of their primary economic asset: land,” said Borneo’s Plight in Malaysia Foundation president Daniel John Jambun.
Writing in Jesseltontimes.com, he asserts that federal management of these agricultural lands directly conflicts with the spirit of the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63),which explicitly preserves state autonomy over land matters.
The renewed campaign seeks to either return the land titles to local indigenous communities or hand administrative oversight over to state-owned bodies like Sawit Kinabalu.
He argued that doing so would ensure agricultural profits and natural resource revenues stay directly within the state to benefit local communities rather than being funnelled to federal agencies.
He also said the plantations relied heavily on foreign migrants, displacing local youth from land ownership.
“While thousands of young Sabahans face landlessness today, these federal corporate plantations relied heavily on foreign migrant labour, altering local demographics and displacing local rural youth from agricultural land ownership.”
As debates over Sabah’s constitutional entitlements under MA63 intensify,the land review has emerged as a crucial benchmark for federal-state relations.
Local leaders maintain that restoring land sovereignty is essential to addressing decades of systemic socio-economic disparity across rural Sabah. — Nov 7, 2026
Main photo credit: Bernama
