The Forestry Administration has teamed up with the Cambodian Wildlife Conservation Society and Forest Carbon to develop a large-scale REDD project in eastern Cambodia, officials said yesterday.
REDD – or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, a UN initiative – is one of the key programs the Royal Government plans to implement as part of its climate change combat agenda…
Total outstanding loans in the microfinance sector reached $815.47 million in the third quarter, a 25.8 percent rise compared to beginning of the year, according to data released yesterday by the Cambodia Microfinance Association (CMA)…
Despite growth in the sector, microfinance institutions said nonperforming loans were on the rise due to the damage inflicted on agricultural communities by flooding that has gripped the country during the past month…
Total exports during the first nine months of the year rose 41 percent to $3.5 billion compared to the same period in 2010, according to data released by the Ministry of Commerce.
Of the total amount, $3.1 billion was in garments, $10 million in paddy rice, and $160 million in rubber…
The government’s proposed NGO draft law is a barrier to effective aid and development, civil society organizations said yesterday during a workshop in Phnom Penh focused on compiling a report on Cambodia’s climate for NGOs ahead of a global forum on aid effectiveness to be held in South Korea on November 29…
Lun Borithy, executive director of the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia (CCC), said on the sidelines of the workshop that the proposed NGO law is only one of the many factors plaguing the country’s development…
More than 60 percent of nearly 50,000 evacuated families have returned home as floods recede in areas along the Mekong River and other parts of the country, said the National Committee for Disaster Management (NCDM).
Nearly all displaced families have gone back to flood-wrecked villages in Stung Treng, Kratie and Kompong Cham provinces after water levels fell in the upper part of the Mekong, said Keo Vy, Cabinet chief of the NCDM…
October marks the start of the main rice harvest in Thailand, the world’s largest exporter of the grain. Traders are waiting to see the full impact of flooding on the crop, but it’s already clear that output across Southeast Asia will fall substantially. The U.N.’s food agency estimated last week that 12.5% of rice paddy had been damaged in Thailand. Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines also took a hit, with farmers in Vietnam, the second-largest exporter, largely spared. Naturally the U.N. is concerned about food shortages in the affected areas and the impact on poor rice-importing countries. In addition to flooded fields that can’t be harvested on time, grain warehouses have been inundated. Prior to these losses, global rice production was forecast to hit a new record high of 461 million tons, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture….
The worst floods in a decade may boost the number of nonperforming loans in the Kingdom’s microfinance industry in the fourth quarter, insiders said yesterday.
However, those insiders said the damage done to Cambodia’s agriculture sector would not have a significant impact given the MFIs’ diversified portfolio of loans.
The non-performing loan rate climbed just 0.14 per cent year-on-year between July and September to 1.24 per cent, according to the Cambodian Microfinance Association, even though seasonal flooding in the latter month has since destroyed crops and caused more than 200 deaths…
The Kingdom’s latest brewery is set to launch on November 1, introducing a new player into the growing Cambodian beer market, insiders said yesterday.
The Khmer Brewery plant, a US$60 million joint venture between locally based Chip Mong Group and major international brewery manufacturer Ziemann Group, will aim to produce 1 million to 2 million hectolitres annually.
“Currently, there is not enough quality beer in the Cambodian market to meet demand,” Chip Mong Group chairman Chen Yiye told the Post yesterday…
Workers at a garment factory in Kampong Speu province that supplies global retailer H&M will return to work tomorrow, after more than 100 staff were hopitalised on Monday, following what they and union representatives described as a mass fainting incident.
A spokesperson for H&M’s headquarters in Sweden, however, yesterday denied that the fainting had occurred. “Our staff have visited the … factory and we can now say that no mass faintings occurred at Anful [on] Monday,” Anna Eriksson told the Post. “Rather, the workers felt stressed after unfamiliar sounds from an exhaust fan,” she said by email…
They’ve wept, they’ve yelled and they’ve prayed as they watched excavators tear down their homes, so perhaps it’s understandable that the residents of Boeung Kak lake are now turning to song.
“Mom goes to protest, the children cry and sleep on the ground,” go the lyrics to the plaintive title track on Development Separates Families, a music CD written and composed by Boeung Kak residents facing eviction by real estate developer Shukaku Inc.
Sitting in a blue tent on the site where eight of their homes were demolished little more than a month ago, villager Tep Vanny, who sings on one of the eight tracks, said yesterday that the song is meant to express the loneliness of the children of Boeung Kak lake residents, who often have nobody to take care of them when their mothers go to protest…
The Minister for Agriculture yesterday appealed to buyers to address the shortage of pigs in Phnom Penh by applying for licenses that would allow them to import more livestock from neighbouring countries.
An industry representative and a market expert, however, warned of the potential fallout that more pig imports could have on Cambodian pig farmers…
Overseas labor recruitment agencies that send maids to Malaysia are planning to lay off about 1,000 staff members as they prepare to close down many pre-departure training centers following a growing scandal around abuses and criminal activity during the recruitment, training and sending of maids.
An Bunhak, president of the Association of Cambodian Recruitment Agencies (ACRA), said the association’s 27 member companies, which run about 80 training centers, had held a meeting and many had decided to switch to a skeleton staff…
The Agriculture Ministry is preparing to distribute rice seedlings in an effort to replace more than 220,000 hectares of rice paddy that has been destroyed by flooding. However, by the time floodwaters recede, there won’t be enough time left in the rainy season to replant rice in some areas, warned Hean Vanhorn, deputy director general of the general department of agriculture…
Cambodian debt to China now stands at $4 billion, 35 percent of last year’s gross domestic product and more than half of the country’s total outstanding debt to foreign donors, according to a senior government official.
The amount of money Cambodia owes China has been growing steadily in recent years. The latest payment from China came last week in the form of a $500 million loan for post-flood infrastructural development.
“The European [Union] countries are having an economic crisis, and its 27 members are struggling, so we only have China,” Cheam Yeap, chairman of the National Assembly’s commission on Economics, Finance, Banking and Auditing, said on Monday.
He added that Cambodia’s total amount of outstanding debt has reached $7 billion, a figure that includes $1.8 billion in debt to Russia and the US that was accumulated in the 1970s and 1980s…
The government and the US Embassy yesterday signed off on half the nearly $65 million the US is giving Cambodia in aid this year, more than two months after Cambodia cancelled a major meeting with its foreign donors that was scheduled for November.
Held roughly every 18 months, the Cambodia Development Cooperation Forum is the best chance donors have to discuss with Cambodia’s most senior leaders the government’s progress on development targets that both sides signed off on at the last Forum. Everything from school enrollment rates to corruption-fighting reforms gets covered…
Experts yesterday urged the Ministry of Labor to extend the latest draft of a forthcoming trade union law to include civil servants, who are currently shut out of the law in contravention of international conventions…
Rong Chhun, president of both the Cambodian Confederation of Unions and the Cambodian Independent Teachers Association, hinted yesterday that demonstrations might take place if the law is not revised to include civil servants…
Some 100 former residents of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak community yesterday delivered petitions to 10 embassies and the offices of the World Bank and European Union asking them to pressure the government into increasing the compensation for their evictions.
Sam Vanna, a representative of the residents, said the group represents the roughly 3,000 families that were evicted from the site over the past year to make way for a real estate project led by Shukaku Inc, a private firm belonging to CPP Senator Lao Meng Khin, who is also chairman of the powerful Phanimex group…
With ongoing floods causing an unprecedented $521 million in estimated damages, economists warn that poor farmers are being the hardest hit. The latest government estimate marks a roughly threefold increase from an earlier prediction of more than $161 million, which was the cost of the 2000 Mekong floods.
Destruction has also eclipsed the about $130 million in damages caused by Typhoon Ketsana in 2009, said Keo Vy, cabinet chief at the National Committee for Disaster Management…
Police said they freed one recruit from a Phnom Penh recruitment agency this weekend and were seeking to prosecute its director, adding that they were doing the same for the director of the SKMM recruitment agency, where 78 recruits were freed last week. The court has also issued an arrest warrant for the director of the controversial agency T&P, officials said.
An opposition lawmaker welcomed the police initiatives but questioned why the Ministry of Labor was not leading the inspection of overseas labor agencies, which still hold thousands of female recruits in their training centers despite last week’s government ban on sending maids to Malaysia…
Reactions in Malaysian media to Cambodia’s Oct 15 ban on sending maids to Malaysia contain a mix of shame, indignation and a need to stress that most employers in Malaysia do not mistreat foreign domestic workers.
“There are very few bad apples among us,” said an editorial in The Star newspaper on Sunday. “What a reputation we have garnered. How unfair. How exaggerated. And how untrue. Malaysians are generally good to their maids. We are not maid killers.”…
