Srekor village has stood on the banks of the Se San River in northeastern Cambodia for generations. In a few years it will be gone, submerged along with more than 300 square kilometres of surrounding farmland and forest. ...
For 37-year-old rice farmer Pa Tou, the future looks bleak. The relocation... continue
More than 100 villagers in Preah Vihear province have accused a group of Chinese-owned sugar plantations of encroaching on their farms and community forests since mid-2012 and say they are still waiting for a resolution.
Sen Som, a rice farmer in Chheb district, said Heng Rui International – one of five Chinese firms with government-bestowed economic land concessions in the province – has cleared about 1,000 hectares of farms and fields belonging to 130 families since July. …
Ethnic Bunong villagers living in Mondolkiri province’s Pech Chreada district have sent a petition to the Ministry of Land Management, urging the government to refrain from issuing them private land titles, local officials said yesterday.
This way they may instead to eligible for a communal title in the future.
Bunong residents of Bosra commune’s seven villages have long been divided over whether to accept individual land titles, or hold out for a race communal title, which is designed to protect the ancestral land of indigenous communities and conserve their tradition of rotation farming techniques. …
Cambodian officials in provinces bordering Thailand said the price of Cambodian corn would increase as a result of a reduced supply and a new Thai government policy of importing more corn for animal processing.
The Bangkok Post reported on Tuesday that the Thai cabinet approved the import of 450,000 tonnes of tariff-free maize from Cambodia and Laos.
Cambodian farmers, however, greeted the new policy warily, expressing doubts as to the effectiveness of the price raise. …
According to a report by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Cambodian farmers planted 184,872 hectares of corn across the country and cultivated about 770,860 tonnes of corn in 2012, with Battambang, Preah Vihear, Kandal, Kampong Cham, Pailin, Banteay Meanchey and Pursat provinces leading in production. …
Data from the Ministry of Commerce showed that Cambodia’s total corn exports dropped 42.21 per cent to 20,443.66 tonnes in 2012 from 35,381.63 tonnes in 2011.
Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday said more investment in agriculture was needed to
ensure that Cambodia can process its crops and add value to agricultural produce being
exported abroad.
Speaking at the inauguration of a new cargo port in Kandal province, Mr. Hun Sen said there was an oversupply in this year’s rice and cassava harvests, leading prices in the market to fall. “I want to raise some points that relate to production and processing that were absolutely our mistake, that the speed of production grew too fast, and supply was more than we expected,” he said. …
According to figures from the CamControl department inside the Ministry of Commerce, cassava exports more than doubled from 277,000 tons in 2011 to 722,000 tons in 2012.
The cabinet approved a plan for the Public Warehouse Organisation to import 450,000 tonnes of tariff-free maize from Laos and Cambodia. …
Another 250,000 tonnes of maize would be imported from Cambodia, with 100,000 tonnes in August and another 150,000 tonnes between November and January 2014 for use as raw material for animal feed production.
The maize imports aim to ease the tight supply in the animal feed market due to global supply shortfalls as a result of droughts. …
One hot day in June, 2009, Ven Samin, a member of the ethnic Suoy minority in Kampong Speu province, grabbed her digital camera and headed out of the house.
The 44-year-old arrived at a collection of damaged rice paddies in Oral district and began taking photos. …
Not long afterwards, Samin said, officials acting as representatives for an agricultural company with which the ethnic Suoy villagers had been feuding told her she was not permitted to photograph the sites because she didn’t belong to an accredited news outlet. …
Companies embroiled in land disputes with ethnic minorities will likely find themselves dealing with more Samins before long. Her actions represent changing attitudes among members of indigenous ethnic minorities in Cambodia. …
About 80 families travelling to Phnom Penh from Kampong Chhnang province for a land dispute-related protest yesterday were blocked on their way to the capital and told to resolve the matter locally. …
The villagers are locked in an unusual land feud with an agricultural firm, Ou Kolly Development, which has cleared hundreds of hectares to prepare the groundwork for cassava plantations.
Ou Kolly, who could not be reached, has claimed that in 2011, local representatives of the community sold about 600 hectares to the firm. But not all residents agreed to the deal – or respected it.
Last year, the holdouts took action, and went out farming on a portion of land.
The company complained and the court summonsed seven villagers for questioning.
The protesters yesterday are demanding that the company return 100 hectares for the purposes of subsistence farming. …
Rulling party Senator Ly Yong Phat’s Phnom Penh Sugar Company announced yesterday that it had amended its hiring policy to forbid contractors from employing children, while at the same time, opposition parliamentarian Mu Sochua made public her plans to visit the company to investigate its labour practices.
According to a copy of a January 9 internal memo provided by the company – and issued five days after an article was published in the Post detailing the widespread use of child labour at the company’s Kampong Speu sugarcane plantation – the company warned contractors responsible for hiring plantation labourers that anyone caught hiring persons under the age of 18 would be fined 50,000 riel ($12.50) on their first offence, and have their contract terminated on their second. …
In an interview yesterday, she said that she was planning a trip to Europe to address the issue of so-called “blood sugar” with EU parliamentarians, and stressed that the “company cannot just be let off the hook because of this internal memo”, calling the very use of contractors a major problem. …
First, agricultural company DM group displaced them, now a recently arrived commercial farmer has threatened their lives and chased them off their new land, said representatives of 12 families engaged in a long-standing land dispute in Ratanakkiri province.
On Wednesday, the 12 Tampuon ethnic minority families filed a complaint to the provincial court against Kuchu Chanbonak, a relative of the commercial farm’s owner, accusing him and other employees of destroying their crops and using guns to threaten them, said villager representative Seoung Yarat. …
The families’ land – one hectare in Lumphat district’s Kaleng commune – was given to them by commune authorities in 2008 after DM Group pushed them off their old land. Authorities have been largely unresponsive to the complaints of the 136 Tampuon families who since 2005 have continued to dispute DM Group’s encroachment on 260 hectares of their land. …
More than seven months after government security forces violently evicted hundreds of people living in Kratie province’s Broma village to quell a so-called secessionist movement, more than 70 families are still being prevented by patrolling soldiers from returning to the site of their former homes, local officials said yesterday.
Kompong Damrei commune clerk Khin Doung said that 74 families, who since 2008 have lived and farmed on more than 80 hectares of land in Broma, last week tried to return home to harvest cassava crops they planted prior to being evicted with the rest of the villagers in May.
The families, however were prevented from returning to their homes by a group of more than 20 soldiers, Mr. Dound said. …
But provincial police chief Chuong Sieng Hak said that soldiers in Broma are only there to keep them safe. …
“It is because we are worried about robberies which happen sometimes” …
Rights groups said the government’s claim that villagers were part of a secessionist movement was merely an excuse to evict them on behalf of Casotim. …
According to rights group Licadho, Casotim had a 15, 000 hectare land concession located about 10 km from Broma.
It also has a 100,000 hectare logging claim that overlaps with the villagers, but this was suspended in 2001, when the government put moratorium on timber concessions.
Exports of milled rice had fallen dramatically last year because of the poor quality of paddy rice, insiders said yesterday.
Milled-rice producers told the Post that a large amount of paddy rice broke.
From every 100 kilograms of paddy rice, 20 to 23 kilograms of milled rice were produced, Hun Lak, secretary of the Alliance of Rice Producers and Exporters of Cambodia, said. …
Because of those poor results, the Alliance of Rice Producers and Exporters of Cambodia had provided less capital for millers to buy paddy rice, he said. …
Keth Seng, secretary of state for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fishery and Forestry, said during a meeting earlier this month the price of Cambodian rice had dropped about 100 riel a kilogram on average.
Although rice traders cut their prices, the cost of transportation increased last year. In addition, rice-exporting countries such as India sold old stocks of rice, affecting the demand in Cambodia.
When the harvest season for Kampot pepper starts next month, farmers in Kampot province expect this year’s crop to yield more than 17 percent above last year, a representative of the farmers said.
Nguon Lay, president of the Kampot Pepper Association, said last week that he expected the province to produce 27 tons of pepper by the end of the harvest in May, up 23 tons of pepper produced during last years harvest. …
The price farmers are getting for their peppers has also risen since last year, he said. Black pepper is now worth $11 per kg, up from 8 kg last year and white pepper is now fetching $18 per kg up from $15 per kg last year. …
He said pepper was largely been exported to Western countries like France and the U.S but that demand had recently from Asian countries. … “but we can’t supply them because we don’t have enough yet.” …
Pepper Farmers in Kompong Cham province, whose produce does not carry the sough after “Geographic indicator ” of Kampot pepper, were also expecting a good harvest.
“Our pepper is cheaper than Kampot pepper because it is not famous… but we make more money than Kampot farmers because we produce more… We have a market to export into Thailand”.
Cambodia and China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Tuesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on strengthening bilateral communication and cooperation in agriculture.
The deal was inked between Lord Reasmey, secretary-general of Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture, and Zhang Mingpei, director- general of Department of Agriculture of Guangxi (DAG), under the presence of Cambodian Agriculture Minister Chan Sarun.
According to the MoU, both sides are willing to improve and strengthen the communication on improved crop/plant varieties and technology. …
A group of ethnic Kreung families living in Ratanakkiri’s Lumphat district have accused a wealthy plantation owner of destroying their crops and threatening to evict them from their homes, local officials and villagers said yesterday.
Soeun Sarath, a representative of 13 indigenous families living in Kaleng commune, said that workers employed by Kim Kheng Chou destroyed mango and jack fruit trees growing near their houses on Sunday. …
Vietnamese enterprises so far have invested in 124 projects in Cambodia with total registered capital of some US$2.5 billion, four times higher than the figure in 2009.
As such, Vietnam is now among the top five investors in Cambodia, said the Association of Vietnamese Investors in Cambodia (AVIC) at a conference to review three years promoting Vietnam trade and investment in Cambodia held in Phnom Penh this Tuesday. …
Prime Minister Hun Sen has said the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) will never tax farmland.
“It would burden our farmers,” he said in Takeo Sunday. “Although national revenue that comes from land taxes is spent on building roads, water systems, hospitals and schools, we still don’t need to get taxes from farmers.” …
Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday encouraged Cambodians to strive for Chinese-style millionaire status as he inaugurated a sugar refinery located inside two controversial plantations belonging to CPP Senator Ly Yong Phat and his wife in Kompong Speu province.
“I have one clear policy in strengthening the capacity of local investors, and that is making Cambodians become rich,” Mr. Hun Sen said in a speech at the inauguration. …
Though the mood was congratulatory yesterday at the inauguration of ruling party Senator Ly Yong Phat’s sugar company – a gleaming, new facility nestled in between two hills in Kampong Speu province’s Omlaing commune – the mood just a few kilometres away bordered on desperation.
Sitting in a small house just off a red dirt road, 55-year-old Kim Ponn’s voice cracked as she explained how after two years of struggling to get her farmland back after losing it to Yong Phat’s Phnom Penh Sugar Company, she had hoped to attend the ceremony – which was presided over by Prime Minister Hun Sen – if only to seek some answers. …
