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.
The father of three children attacked with wooden sticks and steel poles by employees of well-connected DM Group in Ratanakkiri province has filed a lawsuit against the firm, and is asking for tens of thousands of dollars in compensation. ..
The provincial court has charged the four employees and released a Royal Cambodia Armed Solider, Colonel Srey Thoeun who was at the scene, on the grounds that he did not take part in the beatings. …
Mr. [Ry] Saron [the victims' father] said he was also preparing to ask local authorities to endorse the land certificate he was recently issued for the farm his children were protecting when they were attacked in order to secure a $2,000 loan to pay his son’s hospital bills in Vietnam. …
On Sunday, however, Mr.[Ven] Vibol [DM Group spokesman] attributed Saturday’s altercation to a misunderstanding because the firm’s employees were not clear about who the land belonged to.
As work begins on Cambodia’s biggest dam, those advocating against its construction have warned that the region’s rush for hydropower will have a disastrous effect on millions of people who rely on the Mekong River to survive.
Last month, workers began preparing an area in northeastern Cambodia for a huge hydropower project, the 400-megawatt Lower Se San 2 Dam. …
Scientists estimated the Lower Se San 2 Dam could reduce the total fish yield of the Mekong Basin by 9.3 percent.
“So it’s 9.3 percent of 2.1 million tons – which is a gigantic amount,” said Baran. “In other words, this expected loss represents around 200,000 tons per year, which is much more than the whole marine sector of Australia. And, nine times more than the annual inland fish catch in Germany or the U.S.” …
Meanwhile, work on the Lower Se San 2 Dam has started and thousands of people who live in the areas that will be submerged by the dam’s vast 300-square-kilometer reservoir have been told they will have to move. …
One of them is 37-year-old Pa Tou. He said none of the 400 ethnic minority families in Srekor village on the banks of the Se San River wants to leave. …
Pa Tou, who has three daughters, said that will not be possible at the relocation site, which is miles from the river. He said the land there is poor for farming – most of it is rocky or covered with trees – and there are no health clinics and no schools. He fears they will all be left much worse off.
Seventy-two ethnic minorities Banong families received communal titles to a combined 1,008 hectares of ancestral land in Mondolkiri province yesterday morning in a ceremony attended by Land Management Minister Chhun Lim.
Communal titles were designed to protect the ancestral lands of the country’s minorities from outside developers, and yesterday’s titles were only the fourth or fifth to be issued since they were established by the 2001 Land Law. …
Besides the spirit forests, the titles will protect the communities’ traditional rotational farmland, residential land and land held in reserve for future generations for farming and living. …
Some 200 Koh Kong farmers locked in a long-running land dispute with two sugar plantations met Tuesday with a representative of the Thailand-based owners for the first time since the land dispute began in 2006.
Khamrom Phochai, a Thai national and representative of Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar Industry, the firm that holds a 70 percent stake in the two 10,000-hectare plantations, said he was appointed only recently to investigate the land dispute and had visited the area to follow up on a report from local government officials. …
“After today’s meeting, I realized that there are 200 families still in dispute and asking for their land back,” he said. …
Representatives of nearly 200 ethnic Kreung families living in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Chum district on Tuesday filed a complaint with local rights group Adhoc, accusing a Vietnamese rubber company of clearing their ancestral land, local officials and a rights worker said.
Chhay Thy, provincial investigator for Adhoc, said that since late last year, employees of the CRD rubber company have bulldozed the boundaries of a 700-hectare area the firm intends to turn into a rubber plantation. The destruction has spread to the property of 31 ethnic minority families living in La’ak commune’s Kaim village. …
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, in 2011 CRD was granted a 7,591-hectare concession that cuts through the province’s O’Chum, Bakeo and Andong Meas districts. …
Twelve ethnic Tampuon families living in Ratanakkiri province’s Lumphat district yesterday filed a complaint with the provincial land management department, accusing the owners of a Vietnamese rubber plantation of clearing their farmland, local official said.
Tun Vantham, chief of Samuth Loeu village in Seda commune, said that since January 18, employees of the Kao Su Ea Lev BM Yoy Stock company have cleared more than 10 hectares of farmland belonging to 12 of the indigenous families, all of whom live outside the company’s 8,400-hectare, government-awarded economic land concession. …
As the cashew-harvesting season in Cambodia’s northeastern provinces begins, farmers are expecting a good crop due to favorable weather conditions last year, an official said yesterday. …
A draft law on the financing of a controversial dam project in Stung Treng province obtained yesterday shows that about $38 million will be spent on the resettlement of almost 800 families. This marks a significant decrease from the more than 1,000 families the companies building the dam originally said would be affected.
The draft law – which is dated January 10 and is currently awaiting approval at the National Assembly – is signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and reveals other key financing and resettlement details for the affected villagers. Hailing from Srekor, Kbal Romeas and Phluk communes, the majority of those affected say they have received no official information from the project’s owners, local conglomerate Royal Group and China Hydrolancang International Energy Co. Ltd. …
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. …
Heavy rainfall over the weekend has destroyed all the salt that was due to be harvested this month in Kep and Kampot provinces, farmers said yesterday.
“The salt that we planned to harvest this week was completely destroyed because of heavy rain,” said Um Chon, chief of the Kep-Kampot Salt Producers Community, adding that farmers last year harvested between 20 and 30 percent of the year’s salt in January. …
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. …
A new report on land grabbing around the world highlights Cambodia as a prime example of the ill effect of the growing global appetite for farmland by industrial scale operations.
Released Wednesday in Stockholm by three Swedish NGOs, The Race for Land offers Cambodia as one of two case studies – the other is Mozambique – of how rising food prices and demand for bio-fuel is driving the trend. …
CPP Senator and business tycoon Ly Yong Phat has convinced to more families in Koh Kong province to take a cash payout in exchange for dropping out of a lawsuit involving two local sugarcane plantations he once co-owned, official said.
More that 200 families in Sre Ambel district are suing the plantation owners for allegedly stealing their farmland in 2006. …
Families in Koh Kong province will today file a complaint with the U.S. government against American Sugar Refining (ASR) over farmland they claim they were violently evicted from to make way for two sugar plantations that supply the New York-based company. …
The 207 Koh Kong families will file their complaint with the U.S. National Contact Point, a government office in Washington that handles disputes with multinational firms within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to a statement released yesterday by the Community Legal Education Center (CLEC) and EarthRights International, which are representing the families.
The families have lodged their complaint against ASR because in 2009 the firm bought the British refineries that continue to import the plantations’ sugar. …
The complaint in the U.S. is largely symbolic, admitted Man Vuthy, a case coordinator for CLEC, as the National Contact Point can push ASR into mediation with the families but cannot order it to compensate them. …
About 200 families in Koh Kong province’s Botum Sakor district were threatened with legal action yesterday by the district governor, who told them their 100-hectare plantation had been earmarked for development by a Chinese firm, a village representative alleged. …
Two days later, Botum Sakor district governor Orn Phirak told Meas Sen the villagers must stop farming the land or face court. …
Orn Phirak … said the government had last year granted Sinomexim Investment land for a rubber plantation covering 4,000 hectares – about 200 of which were in Andong Teuk commune.
Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cabinet yesterday said it would take no action on a request from about 100 villagers living inside a social land concession in Preah Vihear province seeking a resolution to an ongoing dispute over 5,000 hectares of land.
Since 2007, villagers have protested the clearing of their farmland in Kulen district in preparation for the area to be used to house army veterans and their families. …
Nov Ra, an official for Hun Sen’s Cabinet, said he would pass the request over to the local authorities to deal with. …
Villagers accused of incitement in a long-running land dispute with a company owned by the wife of a government minister did not show up for scheduled questioning yesterday at the Kompong Chhnang Provincial Court, officials said.
On September 17, KDC Development company, owned by Chea Kheng, the wife of Minister of Industry, Mines and Energy Suy Sem, filed a criminal complaint against four villagers in Kompong Tralach district for inciting fellow villagers to illegally farm land claimed by the company.
The four accused … submitted a letter to provincial prosecutor Penh Vibol on Tuesday requesting that questioning be delayed until the provincial court has addressed civil complaints filed by 51 of the affected families in the past three weeks.
Mr. Vibol, however, denied the villagers’ request for a postponement and would move forward with criminal proceedings despite the failure of villagers to appear for questioning yesterday. …
Kampong Chhnang villagers who have been hit with a new lawsuit over property that they and the wife of a senior government official both claim said yesterday that coming to court would be impossible, as they did not have a defense lawyer and needed time to locate land titles as evidence.
When asked for a delay, the court agreed and the provincial prosecutor has given the accused only until Wednesday to locate legal representation. …
The dispute ramped up in 2007, when KDC International, owned by Chea Kheng, the wife of Minister of Industry Suy Sem, bulldozed 145 hectares of farmland in Lorpeang village in Kampong Chhnang’s Ta Ches commune without compensating local residents. …
