Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday that he hoped land being registered to rural families as part of the government’s nationwide land-titling program would be used to cultivate rubber trees in order to help the country compete with Vietnam as the world’s third-largest rubber exporter. ...
Speaking at the opening of... continue
The Ratanakkiri Provincial Court yesterday charged two staffers of Vietnamese rubber concessionaire Hoang Anh Ratanakkiri (CRD) with causing intentional damage for allegedly setting fire to several homes belonging to a landowner with whom they were embroiled in a land dispute, deputy prosecutor Mom Vanda said. …
Ly Sok Ngim, owner of the plantation where the buildings were set ablaze, said she had filed a complaint with police seeking $200,000 in damages from Hoang Anh Ratanakkiri, which she said was the parent company of CRD. …
A year to the day since armed soldiers stormed into the remote village of Pro Mar in Kratie province, killing a 14-year-old girl, arresting her husband and evicting hundreds of families, Sreng Pho still has nightmares.
“I’m really scared when I think back to that day the authorities came to crack down on our village,” she said yesterday. …
Pho said villagers had been left without farmland and wanted to return to plant cassava but wasn’t sure if authorities were building a military base in the area, as reported by the Post in February. …
Prior to the eviction, villagers had been locked in a dispute with the company Casotim. …
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Wednesday inaugurated a rubber processing plant here, saying the factory would contribute to developing the country’s fast-growing rubber sector.
The 7 million U.S. dollar plant, invested by Cambodia’s Sopheak Nika Investment Agro-Industry Company, was built on the area of 9 hectares in Sesan district of Stung Treng province, about 455 kilometers from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, according the company’s report. …
The report said the company received economic concessional land of 10,000 hectares from the government in March 2005 in order to grow rubber trees, and to date, the firm has invested 19 million U. S. dollars for rubber plantation. …
As of last year, the government had granted about 1.2 million hectares of economic concession land to companies for rubber plantation, the premier said, adding that so far, the country has planted rubber trees on the area of 280,350 hectares, and about 55, 000 hectares of them are old enough to be yielded.
Ratanakkiri provincial police on Monday arrested the chief of staff of a Vietnamese rubber concessionaire and his Cambodian translator who are believed to have burned down more than $5,000 worth of property related to a land dispute in O’Chum district, police said.
Meas Pov Bora, chief of the provincial minor crimes office, said that Vietnamese national Ngvieng Hong Fou, 30, chief of staff for a company called CRD, and his translator Sim Borin, 31, were arrested for allegedly setting fire to one house and four huts, and destroying some 200 bunches of cassava plants – alone worth $5,650 – belonging to local landowner Ly Sok Ngim. …
Provincial authorities in Ratanakkiri have warned ethnic Jarai villagers that they will be arrested if they continue to stop bulldozers belonging to a Vietnamese company from clearing forest in O’Yadav district’s Paknhai commune, community leaders said yesterday.
Sav Finh, leader of Lom village’s forestry protection committee, said provincial and forestry administration officials visited the cleared area late last week to warn villagers not to take direct action against the company again. …
O’Yadav district governor Dork Sar said the forest belonged to the state and that, if the company had been granted the land, the villagers had no right to stop the company’s activities. …
On May 13, we ran an interview with London-based NGO Global Witness accusing the Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation of financing two Vietnamese rubber companies that are allegedly involved in land grabs in Cambodia and Laos. …
We asked both banks for a response and invited them on to the show to explain their positions. Both declined to be interviewed but sent these statements:
Michael West, Managing Director / Head of Communications, Asia Pacific [Deutsche Bank]:
“Deutsche Bank does not provide financing to Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group (HAGL), Dong Phu Rubber or Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG). The DWS fund shares referred to are held on behalf of investors. Deutsche Bank provides clerical trustee services to HAGL which is a listed company as it does to thousands of publicly listed companies globally.”
Hannfried von Hindenburg, Head of Communications for IFC in East Asia and the Pacific:
“IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, works with financial intermediaries, such as funds, because they can contribute to inclusive and sustainable financial markets that are essential to eradicating poverty and job creation. …
IFC will carefully study the findings of the Global Witness research and taking this research into consideration is part of our ongoing monitoring of our investments in Dragon Capital and VEIL.”
A Vietnamese rubber tycoon has rejected accusations by Global Witness, a group that campaigns on resource issues, that it was involved in a land grabbing crisis in Southeast Asia.
Doan Nguyen Duc, the chairman of Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) Group, told Vietnamese media the information provided by London-based Global Witness in its report was total fabrication. …
According to the report, the two firms have caused widespread evictions, illegal logging and food insecurity in the countries. …
It alleges the IFC invested US$14.95 million in a Vietnamese fund that holds 5 percent equity in HAGL, while Deutsche Bank owns some $4.5-million-worth of HAGL shares. Deutsche Bank is also said to have 1.2-million shares in a subsidiary company of VRG amounting to more than $3 million.
As news of the accusation spread in Vietnam, HAGL shares fall around 6 percent to VND21,400 on Tuesday.
Duc lost VND436.25 billion (US$20.83 million) on over 311 million shares, nearly half the company’s shares, he holds.
After the accusations were made public, HAGL released a statement confirming that the company’s subsidiaries invested in rubber plantations in each country but the firm “denies seizing land, illegally exploiting wood and other corruption behaviors in Laos and Cambodia.” …
In the wake of a new report from environmental rights group Global Witness rebuking the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Deutsche Bank for investing in rubber plantations accused of illegal logging and forced evictions, both institutions have denied responsibility and deflected the blame elsewhere.
But the investments targeted in the new report are not the first projects for which both the IFC and Deutsche Bank have received criticism in Cambodia.
Local NGOs filed a complaint with the IFC’s compliance ombudsman in 2009 on behalf of 79 families worried that the expansion of Sihanoukville airport was moving forward without their consultation or guarantees of compensation should they be evicted.
Since 2003, the IFC has helped finance Cambodia Airports, which is owned by French construction giant Vinci Group, for projects involving runway expansions at Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville airports.
In July, 387 families living along the outskirts of the Phnom Penh International Airport were served with eviction letters due to expansion plans to the runway. The families insist they have legal tenure to their homes, but the government disagrees and has refused their demands for compensation.
Though the evictions have yet to take place, families have been told by local authorities that the eviction will take place. It was not known yesterday if the ombudsman is monitoring the Phnom Penh airport expansion plan. …
According to Equitable Cambodia, a land rights NGO, Deutsche Bank through DWS [Vietnam Fund] was also invested in KSL—a Thai firm that owns two sugar plantations in Cambodia, which are accused of causing the eviction of hundreds of local villagers. DWS divested from KSL in 2011. …
Around 30 residents from Boeung Kok, Borei Kei and Thmor kol communities gathered and knelt down Monday in front of the Royal Palace to seek intervention from the King to release jailed land activist Yorm Bopha. …
In the petition, they asked him to intervene the Ministry of Justice to release Yorm Bopha and find solutions for the land disputes in their communities. …
There were no clashes between authorities and the residents. …
Deutsche Bank and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) have poured millions of dollars into Vietnamese rubber companies operating in Cambodia that have engaged in illegal logging and forced evictions of local farmers, the environmental rights group Global Witness says in a new report released today.
Drawing on satellite images, government and corporate documents, field visits and exchanges with firms involved, Global Witness deduced that the IFC currently has $14.95 million stake in a Vietnamese-based investment fund investing in Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), a Vietnamese rubber firm listed on the London Stock Exchange. The organization also says that Deutsche Bank holds another $4.5 million worth of HAGL shares, along with $3.3 million in shares of Dong Phu, a member of the state-owned Vietnamese Rubber Group (VRG). …
Combined, Global Witness says, HAGL and VRG alone now control at least 180,000 hectares of rubber plantations in Cambodia.
“HAGL and VRG’s ultimate ownership of these [subsidiary] companies lies behind an intricate web of shell companies,” the Global Witness report says. “This allows them to disguise the fact that they have massively exceeded Cambodia’s legal limit on land holdings,” which sets the ceiling for any on person at 10,000 hectares. …
Cambodian lawmakers have passed a new law on agriculture, but critics say the law does not go far enough to protect the country’s farmers.
The law passed on Thursday evening, but not before debate at the National Assembly. …
During the debate opposition representatives called on the Cambodian government to stop providing land concessions to private companies—either for economic or “social” aims. So-called social land concessions are supposed to go toward the poor. But opposition lawmakers warn that they too can be abused by private companies. …
[Opposition Sam Rainsy Party lawmaker] Yim Sovann also said the government should create a fund of $100 million to protect rice farmers against price fluctuations. That money could come from revenues on casino tariffs, he said. …
Chan Sarun, a CPP government representative, told the Assembly that a $100-million fund is not possible. And he said the government has already banned land concessions, since May 2012. Some 50,000 hectares have been saved from private development since the ban, he said.
In fact, watchdog and rights groups have said many concession deals have continued, despite an announced ban by Prime Minister Hun Sen in May 2012.
Mark Moorstein knew little about Cambodia before he got involved in a lawsuit on behalf of land owners there. But as it’s turning out, the suit could end up affecting most every country in Asia.
Moorstein is a land-use lawyer in Northern Virginia who, like many lawyers, was looking for some pro-bono, charitable work to do on the side. …
Across Asia, almost every country is guilty of baldly seizing its citizens’ land without significant compensation and then selling it to corporations or developers, leaving the owners homeless and often destitute. …
Finally in 2001, Cambodia enacted a Land Law intended to curb these seizures. But like so many measures passed to mollify the Western donors who keep the government afloat, the government immediately began ignoring its own law. Now, as one major Cambodian human rights organization put it: “In Phnom Penh and the 12 provinces” around it “land-grabbing has affected an estimated 400,000 Cambodians since 2003, helping to create a sizable underclass of landless villagers with no means for self-sustenance.” …
It turned out that the land he [Mark Moorstein] focused on — two plots of about 25,000 acres each — is used to grow sugar cane, primarily. A wealthy and powerful Cambodian senator took possession of it after evicting residents from about 200 individual plots. Many of the evictees held identification cards the United Nations had given them when it set up a protectorate in Cambodia 20 years ago. Under the Land Law, that meant they held legal title to the property. …
Once the suit was filed, Tate & Lyle seemed to panic. Very quickly, it sold its entire sugar unit to American Sugar Refining, better known here in the United States for its name-brand product: Domino Sugar. That company is now the defendant, and when contacted for comment, the company declined.
But last Thursday, the company did file its response to the suit. It said Tate & Lyle had no knowledge of any prior ownership of the land in question. The villagers had no claim to the sugar cane grown on the land, even if they did previously own it, because they had not paid for the seeds or production costs. And finally, the defendants claimed, “The English court cannot adjudicate or call into question” matters of Cambodian law dealing with land concessions.
Nonetheless, the British court had already accepted the suit. The case is moving forward, and that all by itself is already encouraging many people. …
The newly appointed Kompong Thom provincial governor on Tuesday promised more than 500 families who were forcefully evicted by a Vietnamese rubber plantation more than three years ago that they would be given replacement land to farm on early next month.
Security forces evicted villagers from Santuk district’s Kraya commune in December 2009 to make way for the Tan Bien-Kompong Thom Rubber Development Company, which was granted an 8,100-hectare land concession in the area. For the past three years, the families have been living at a relocation site with no farmland, about 5 km away. …
The Ministry of Agriculture has signed a deal with Try Pheap Import Export to give the firm the right to purchase all timber felled in economic land concessions (ELCs) in Ratanakkiri province, according to a letter sent from the Agriculture Ministry to the Forestry Administration in February.
Signed by Lor Raksmey, secretary-general at the Ministry of Agriculture, and sent to Forestry Administration chief Chheng Kim Sun, the letter says that the firm owned by well-connected casino, mining and agriculture mogul Try Pheap has been granted purchasing rights over timber in Ratanakkiri in order “to meet local demand and for export” and “generate royalties and dividends for the state’s budget.”
“The forestry administration will allow Try Pheap Import Export to buy wood from every economic land concession located in Ratanakkiri province,” the letter, dated February 26, reads.
Though a senior official in the province said the agreement will help improve the regulation of Ratanakkirri’s timber trade by directing felled trees through only one company, a provincial land rights monitor said the deal would create a market that encourages illegal logging and accelerate the rate at which the forest is being deforested.
Although concessionaires are required under law to log only within their ELCs and pay royalties on any timber they extract, community activists and environmental monitors have complained that many companies regularly cut down trees and systematically smuggle logs across the border to be sold in Vietnam. …
Cambodia’s government has granted ELCs in Ratanakkirri to 27 companies covering a total of 222,933 hectares, according to figures compiled from Adhoc. …
In February 2011, Prime Minister Hun Sen granted Try Pheap two 70-year leases covering 18,885 hectares within the park in Cambodia’s northeast. …
“I don’t know how to protect the territorial integrity [of the nearby Cambodian-Thai border] – even my three hectares of land I cannot protect,” said Bun Chanthorn, 54, one of hundreds of retired and active soldiers who since 2010 have been battling the local authorities and a rubber company over thousands of hectares of land in Pursat’s Veal Veng district. …
“When the country has a war, they need us, but when it is peaceful, they threaten to seize our land without considering our seniority, without considering how we sacrificed our lives for the nation,” he said.
Though Chanthorn has long farmed this land, he has been barred from continuing to do so in the past year by Oknha Try Pheap’s MDS Import-Export Co, Ltd, which was granted a 4,373-hectare concession in the area in December 2010. The new commune chief, said Chanthorn, refused to accept a receipt of ownership issued by his predecessor on the pretext that the area lay inside a conservation zone.
When volunteer students came to the area starting last June, they measured the company’s land, avoiding the villagers, locals told the Post. …
Khoy Sokha, Pursat provincial governor, insisted that the government was working on a solution to the dispute. …
“If they are really soldiers’ families, they will get their social land concession. I will find it for them,” he said. …
Five men working for Ratanakkiri rubber concessionaire DM Group, including a soldier, have been arrested for allegedly beating a villager and his children – one of whom, doctors say, may not survive – in a scuffle over their family’s land, the father said yesterday.
Police confirmed the beating and said the soldier would be sent to court today for questioning, while the four non-military suspects would be sent to be charged.
The father, 52-year-old Ry Sarun, said that on Saturday two bulldozers and 30 DM Group workers came to his land in Ratanakkiri’s Andong Meas district – which had previously been measured and titled by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s youth volunteers – and began to clear it. …
DM Group has been implicated in a slew of alleged abuses in its long-running land disputes in Ratanakkiri. Villagers have claimed to have been intimidated by the concessionaire, and observers have suggested that the company has used lawsuits to stifle dissent. …
Jarai villagers in Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadav district escalated the defense of their protected land this weekend, confiscating the keys and batteries of bulldozers owned by the Vietnamese company they claim has been illegally clearing the area, community leaders said yesterday.
The move comes after a number of protests in recent weeks at two villages in the district against a firm known as Company 72 that is working in an economic land concession area granted to conglomerate Men Sarun Co., Ltd. …
Three companies accused of illegal logging in Ratanakkiri province are in possession of a combined 30,000 hectares of economic land concessions (ELCs) that are likely illegal because they are owned by the same parent firm.
Hoang Anh Andong Meas, Hoang Anh Lumphat and Hoang Anh Ouyadav are all subsidiaries of HAGL, according to the company’s 2012 annual report.
Hoang Anh Andong Meas and Hoang Anh Lumphat’s concessions lie inside the Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary, which rights groups have said is being decimated by illegal loggers who then bring the wood onto company land.
Very similarly named companies – including one called Hoang An Andong Meas, which has a 9,775-hectare concession inside Virachey National Park – operate elsewhere in the province.
Article 59 of the Land Law stipulates individuals or legal entities controlled by the same person cannot hold more than 10,000 hectares of ELCs, even if it is spread over multiple concessions. …
Corruption, a weak judicial system and the potential for complicity with human and labour rights abuses are key risks for firms looking to invest in Cambodia, a new report [by Maplecroft, a UK-based global risk and strategic consulting firm] analysing investment risk in the Kingdom says. …
According to the report, Cambodia presents “extreme” risks in its business environment, labour rights and protection, and climate change vulnerability, with “high” risks for civil and political rights, its macroeconomic environment, poverty and human development, and the regulatory framework.
But Peter Brimble, deputy Cambodia country director at the Asian Development Bank, said business indexes of this kind need to be carefully interpreted. …
“The recent very rapid inflow of Japanese investors into Cambodia perhaps indicates that certain elements of such indexes may not reflect the reality on the ground, “Japanese investors are known to be sensitive to governance and transparency, and have shown their confidence by voting with their investment dollars,” he said. …
