Friday, 15 March 2013

Poor Trunks roads linking to palm oil plantations in KK- Sandakan- Tawau- Interior -Sabah hampering the palm oil industry.

PKR National Supreme Council Member cum PKR SABAH secretary Dr Roland Chia Ming Shen has received many complaints from OIL PALM plantation owners in Sabah facing increasing cost of doing business due to the slow trunk road upgrade between major towns. Many have suffered from slow transport of oil palms to the ports for shipments to harvest fruit bunches for almost a decade.

The government should speed up upgrading of trunk roads here to handle heavy loads of produce. We now face congestion problems," lamented one palm oil planter based in Sandakan during the meeting with Dr Roland Chia PKR Sabah Secretary. Dr Roland Chia reminded the authorities that – do not forget that Sabah produces about a third of Malaysia's palm oil exports. The trunk roads linking Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan, Lahad Datu and Tawau are congested.

The road system is bad, it needs to be upgraded," Oil palm plantation owners in Sabah pay cess to the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, income and corporate tax to the Finance Ministry &7.5 per cent sales tax to Sabah government which amount to about RM1 Billion annually. The palm oil planters in Sabah & Malaysia pay so much tax to the government, (but) what do they (we) get in return? We hear announcements that hundreds of million ringgit had been allocated to build and upgrade roads here but ... until today, implementation remains to be seen," lamented by one of the planters.

According to Dr Roland Chia, in 2010,the Rural and Regional Development Ministry had promised that it will spend about RM2.1 billion to provide rural basic infrastructures in Sabah and Sarawak under the National Key Result Areas (NKRA) this year. The ministry had said the allocation also involved the completion of 2009 projects to build new roads and provide water and electricity supply. Of the total, about RM928 million would be allocated to Sabah.

For NKRA's rural road projects, Sabah was allocated RM134.9 million to complete 40 of last year's projects and another RM56.8 million to implement 36 new roads. Now is 2013, the trunk roads are still in the state of dire straits where chronic road congestions occurring involving private , commercial vehicles travelling from the west coast to east coast of Sabah. There are already economic loss,

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