Orang Asli In Malaysia

Orang Asli are the indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia. They consist of at least 18 ethnic groups generally classified for official purpose under three distinct groups, namely Negritos, Senoi and Proto Malays. These ethnic groups are in range between a few hundreds to more than five thousand. Orang Asli are not a homogeneous group, therefore, they have diverse cultures, traditions, beliefs and languages. Linguistically, some of the northern Orang Asli groups speak a language known as Aslian, which belong to the Mon-Khmer family.

The affairs and development of Orang Asli is under the administrative purview of Jabatan Kemajuan Orang Asli or JAKOA. As of 2014, the total population of Orang Asli in Malaysia is at 178,197, with the Senoi

Sustainability is also conceptualised at a wider framework level as defined by the Brundtland et al. 1987 to encompass state and administrative agency-related sustainable development policies. In the Malaysian context, sustainability from the perspective of the Orang Asli refers to the norms and practices of the Orang Asli in managing natural resources within the forest. When Malaysia became a member party to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1994, there is the need to demonstrate its commitment by translating CBD’s objectives of conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits. Under the CBD, the old practices of engaging the local communities especially, in sharing their knowledge of plant resources have been changed. Under Article 8 of the Convention, each member country shall respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and thus promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of benefits

A structured questionnaire consists of three parts were used in the questionnaire including, attitudinal questions on the current state of biodiversity and deforestation in Malaysia, a CE and follow-up questions and questions related to respondents ' socio-economic status. The final dataset included 239 respondents with 61 entries having to be removed before analysis because respondents did not complete at least one of the CE questions. The attribute levels used to describe the new situation formed a full factorial of 16 binary choice profiles. This number of combinations is in fact manageable in terms of survey design, and we thus avoided the use of a fractional factorial design which reduced the number of combinations of choices to be given to respondents. The use of a full factorial design significantly reduces bias in the estimated coefficients since the main effects are independent of any omitted effect. As a consequence, the welfare measures calculated from model coefficients will be