Like some of its neighbors in Southeast Asia, Malaysia is endowed with substantial areas of little used or unused land, some left from slash and burn and others logged over or still in virgin jungle. For these countries such land areas offer both a potential human "safety valve" as populations increase, and an opportunity to expand production of crops increasingly demanded at home or in the world market.

Yet, for most of Southeast Asia resettlement often has remained a distant goal. Repeatedly, landless families from overcrowded communities have migrated to the frontier, only to fail as pioneering farmers. They have been defeated by lack of transportation and ineffective law and order, or they were without the means and skills to bring appropriate crops into production and to market. Individual families in particular have foundered, where effective cooperation among neighbors might have saved them all.

Even before Malaysian independence in 1957, leaders of the emerging nation studied how to transform landless laborers into productive planters. The Emergency, resulting from communist insurrection, and racial tensions, arising from economic and cultural differences among Malays, Indians and Chinese, demanded basic solutions. Over 116,000 unprocessed land applications had accumulated, and land hunger was compounded by rural unemployment and poverty.

Initially, the federal government relied upon providing an infrastructure of roads, schools, public health facilities and mosques, leaving much of the actual land development to individual states. When this proved inadequate, the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) shifted to a "systems approach." Each resettlement project was planned in advance; contractors built roads, houses and other facilities, cleared land and planted rubber and oil palm trees. As selected families moved in they earned a subsistence allowance tending the eight or ten acres assigned to them, meanwhile starting orchards and gardens on their two-acre home sites. More recently FELDA shifted to allotting settlers shares in jointly managed plantation blocks.

Nearly 60,000 families, resettled on approximately 1.3 million acres, are repaying most capital costs with interest over 20 years. Settler family monthly incomes frequently equal US$245 to US$300 or more. Increasingly, farm leaders share in FELDA's management of marketing, and operation of oil palm mills and rubber factories, as they have done in recent expansion into production of sugar and cocoa.

More than anyone else, the modest public servant who has made a success of FELDA is Raja MUHAMMAD ALIAS. Born in Negri Sembilan in 1932, he entered the Malayan Civil Service in 1958, serving with distinction as District Officer. He was appointed Deputy Chairman of FELDA in 1966 and was elevated to Group Chairman in 1979.

Raja ALIAS has steadily shaped FELDA as a more human-oriented enterprise. By recognizing and mobilizing the initiative of settlers, he is fostering new communities with a growing sense of self-reliance. A thorough planner who has resisted political pressures by insisting FELDA must follow rules, he has quietly organized a high-caliber staff. His own working hours are longest. He refuses fees from the many FELDA-connected enterprises he helps direct. His schoolteacher wife shares family costs. With this quality of commitment he has been able to demonstrate that even on some of Malaysia's less fertile lateritic soils, once-indigent families can create productive agriculture and contribute to community and national well-being.