Dayak Traditionally

Traditionally, Dayak agriculture was based on swidden rice cultivation. Agricultural Land in this sense was used and defined primarily in terms of hill rice farming, ladang (garden), and hutan (forest). Dayaks organised their labour in terms of traditionally based land holding groups which determined who owned rights to land and how it was to be used. The "green revolution" in the 1950s, spurred on the planting of new varieties of wetland rice amongst Dayak tribes.
The main dependence on subsistence and mid-scale agriculture by the Dayak has made this group active in this industry. The modern day rise in large scale monocrop plantations such as palm oil and bananas proposed for vast swathes of Dayak land held under customary rights, titles and claims in Malaysia and Indonesia, threaten the local political landscape in various regions in Borneo. Further problems continue to arise in part due to the shaping of the modern Malaysian and Indonesian nation state on the back of previous British and Dutch colonial political systems and western laws on land tenure. The conflict between the state and the Dayak natives on land laws and native customary rights will continue as long as the colonial model on land tenure is used to define relationships between the Dayak citizenry and the central authority of the state. Dayak cultivated land, interpreted by local customary law, is considered to be owned and held in right by the natives, and the concept of land ownership as thus, flows out of this central belief. This understanding of adat is based on the idea that land is used and held under native domain. Invariably, when European colonial rule was established in the Kalimantan Kingdoms, conflict over the subjugation of territory by a foreign authority erupted several times between the Dayaks and the respective colonial authorities.