Farmers want justice for years of toil on land at PPR site

KULAI: Some 24 farmers today protested at the People's Housing Project (PPR) site at an oil palm plantation seeking justice for their years of hard labour doing farming in the state.
Bukit Batu assemblyman Jimmy Puah Wee Tse said the farmers have been toiling on the 69ha of land for about half a century.
Although they were not owners of the land, he added, two generations have toiled the land planting palm trees, vegetables and other agricultural products.
He said Kumpulan Prasarana Rakyat Johor (KPRJ), 100 % owned by the state government, should consider giving some form of compensation to the farmers on humanitarian grounds.
"The State Government should take into consideration their years of sweat and blood to toil the land. Furthermore, they have been working on the land all their life," he added.
Puah said Hasli Halida, the special assistant to Kulai MP Teo Nie Ching, and him have been seeking a meeting with KPRJ but till today it has proved futile.
"We represent the people and thus its our duty to voice their problems and issues," he said, adding that if the matter remained unresolved, they plan to meet Johor Mentri Besar Datuk Mohamed Khaled Nordin.
For 32 years, Fatimah Kassim said her brother had worked on 0.77ha of land planting cocoa and later switched to planting oil palm trees.
"Its sad to see the fruit of the farmers' labour destroyed over the last two months," she added.
Another farmer, Chai Loon, 78, said he has bee toiling on the land since the 1950s and now it is all gone.