Uggah: Government confident of eradicating hardcore poverty in Sarawak by 2018
THE state government is optimistic that it can eradicate hardcore poverty in the state through its ‘ Income Diversity Programme’ by 2018, reveals Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas.
According to him, currently there are about 27,000 hardcore poor families with an income of less than RM600 per month.
“We hope that through the ‘ Income Diversity Programme’, we would be able to assist these hardcore poor families to earn at least RM1,000 per month by 2018. And in so doing, hopefully, we would eradicate hardcore poverty,” Uggah told The Borneo Post here yesterday.
He said this was the first time that the state had embarked on such systematic programme to eradicate hardcore poverty.
“We can describe these hardcore families as the disadvantaged group as most of them do not have land to till; no skills, as well as living in isolation from the supply chain. So under the Barisan Nasional (BN) administration led by ‘Tok Nan’ (Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Adenan Satem), we are serious in looking into their plight and assisting them to get out of that (poverty) zone,” he stressed.
Uggah, who is also the chairman of Cabinet Committee on SocioEconomic Transformation Programme, was optimistic that the programme would be successful as he had been given the greenlight to mobilise 31 federal and state agencies solely on addressing the issues of hardcore poverty in the state.
“There have been three meetings among these 31 agencies so far, and we are confident that we can achieve our target.”
Uggah, who is also the Modernisation of Agriculture and Rural Development Minister, disclosed that instead of giving subsidies like in the past, the government would now provide incentives for poor farmers especially in the rural areas to increase their income.
“We will now provide incentives for farmers to plant oil palms, sago, coconut, pepper as well as incentive for bird’s nest farming and cattle-rearing,” he said, adding that RM80 million had been set aside for the purpose.
He also stressed that one of the most important issues his ministry would address would be to improve the supply- chain, which in turn would uplift the living standard of the these very poor families.
“Our chief minister in his Budget speech, mentioned that in order to assist the poor, we needed to improve the supply- chain – meaning, we needed to improve the process of getting the produce from the farm right up to the tables of the consumers, so to speak. So we hope to create better facilities where people can sell their products to the consumers such as in the tamu (farmers market),” he stressed.
Meanwhile, Uggah reiterated that past programmes in poverty eradication had been successful in that as a whole, incidence of poverty in Sarawak had fall to 1.6 per cent today from 60 per cent in the 1970s.
“We can proudly said that the government’s eradication programme in the past had been successful and we are much better off than most developing countries in the world. On top of that, we are much better than Kelantan and even Sabah. What we are saying now is that we want to eradicate hardcore poverty by 2018, and hopefully we would be able to increase the income of the rural people from RM2,000 today to about RM4,000 by 2020,” added Uggah.