Ucm Report Introduction

Introduction
Malaysia is divided into two geographical areas which are West Malaysia and East Malaysia, In the East Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak are lying on the northern part of the Island of Borneo. Out of a total land area of 329,837km2, Sarawak occupies as much as 124,4549km2, which makes it the largest state in Malaysia, with a total population of about 2.4 million people that is almost 10 percent of the country’s population of 28 million people. The Bidayuh is among one of the indigenous groups that living in the South-Western part of Sarawak along the border with Kalimantan of Indonesia. The Bidayuh which in the past known as Land Dayaks is the fourth ethnic group of Sarawak in terms of population size, following the Iban, Chinese and Malays with about 193,000 individuals or about 8 percent of the total population of Sarawak that living in the Lundu, Bau and Kuching Districts and in the Serian District and many other more Bidayuh live in the Indonesian side of the border. In West Kalimantan, that is the area where the Malaysian Bidayuhs originally came from and the population is about as many as 2,000,000 that is ten times more than in Sarawak. There is also some of the Bidayuh people who have emigrated to other place of Malaysia especially to the bigger cities like Miri and Kuching in Sarawak, and to Kuala Lumpur in the peninsular. Traditionally the Bidayuh was living in longhouses on hills and their main way of subsistence are shifting cultivation and planting rice and vegetables but as they moved to the plains, they switched to sago and wet rice. Even though nowadays many of them focus on mainly cash crops like pepper, rubber, oil palms and cocoa. Furthermore, there are a vast array of fruits like Durian, Bananas, Rambutan, Mangosteen and Papaya. Some Bidayuh rear animals like pigs and cow for their meat. More Bidayuhs have now found working in government offices or private businesses and most of them located in Kuching which is the capital city of