KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia wants to cut its army of foreign workers, sending home at least 200,000 by 2009, as it tries to reduce dependence on overseas labour and free up jobs for locals, a local newspaper said on Sunday.

“We are in the stage of calling together large companies, associations that represent industry and outsourcing companies for talks to reduce the number,” Raja Azahar Raja Abdul Manap, the top civil servant in Malaysia’s home ministry, told the Star. But the construction, manufacturing and plantation industries, which require foreign workers because Malaysians dislike jobs involving manual labour, would be exempted from the ruling, the paper said.

Malaysia has about 2.3 million foreign workers now and wants to rein in their numbers to 1.8 million, Raja Azahar said, adding that the country’s economic planning unit had worked out a plan to cut the number further, to 1.5 million, by 2015.

In another sign of the growing unease over foreign workers, the paper quoted Malaysian Commodities Minister Peter Chin as saying they were rapidly “colonising” plantations and estates all over the country.

“Foreigners are taking over jobs in plantations and estates,” Chin told a function in eastern Sarawak state on Borneo island, adding that buoyant commodities prices worldwide had led to better working conditions for workers in the sector.

Foreigners make up more than 500,000 of the 800,000 workers now employed on Malaysian rubber, timber and palm oil plantations and estates, the paper added.

Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Thailand are leading sources for Malaysia’s foreign workers.

—Reuters