ABSTRACT
Malaysia has dominated the world market for oil palm since the early 1970s. Cultivation of oil palms, and processing and production of the final product, was primarily located on the Malay Peninsula up to the late 1980s. By then land had become scarce and the development of resettlement schemes and private plantations in the Peninsula stagnated but it had expanded in other regions of Malaysia. Due to the construction of vast plantation areas by the major resettlement parastatal and private companies, the area under oil palms in Sabah, one of the two Malaysian states on Borneo, expanded rapidly in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Sutton 2001). During the mid-1990s, oil palm cultivation started to take off in the other Borneo state, Sarawak.
