Agro-industrial production

More than 250 ethnic Jarai families living in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Yadaw district filed a complaint with rights group Adhoc yesterday, after local officials demanded that the villagers apply for private land titles to protect their property from two Vietnamese rubber companies currently clearing their land, ...

Provincial forestry administration officials in Ratanakkiri have dismissed allegations of illegal logging by community residents and chalked the deforestation up to legitimate clearing. A cursory examination of the land in question yesterday seemed to back the company’s claims, Ly Sophan, a team worker at the provincial ...

Seven months after Prime Minister Hun Sen unveiled an ambitious plan to demarcate 1.8 million hectares of state land and formally acknowledge those who live on it, the completion of the first – albeit the smallest – of eight affected provinces has wrapped up. Marking the ...

The court system is still “chronically underfunded” and laws on its management are almost 20 years overdue, the U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi said yesterday. One year ago, during his sixth mission to Cambodia, Mr. Subedi described reform in the courts as moving at a ...

A final report from Thailand’s human rights commission on the alleged rights violations of a Thai company involved in two Cambodian sugar plantations is expected by late January, a member of the commission said. In July, the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand said its investigation ...

The European Union’s ambassador to Cambodia yesterday urged the government to heed the advice of the U.N.’s visiting human rights envoy, who has come under increasing rebuke from officials for his unflattering reports. Addressing a crowd of about 3,000, mostly garment factory workers, at Phnom Penh’s ...

Economic land concessions granted to a pair of Vietnamese companies in Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadav district were endangering the traditional lifestyles of as many as 200 ethnic-minority families, villagerstold the Post yesterday. As the companies actively cleared forest to make room for the eventual rubber plantations, the government ...

U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi, who arrived in Cambodia Sunday on a five-day mission, spent yesterday, International Human Rights Day, in Kompong Chhnang province with about 300 villagers from a community embroiled in a long-running land dispute with the wife of a government minister. James ...

In the latest chapter of what is proving to be an arduous struggle to protect a government demarcated Community Forest in Battambang province, 36 hectares of the land have reportedly been given over to outsiders including a military official. ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen mocked a group of ethnic minority villagers who tried to petition him on Friday about their land dispute in northern Cambodia’s Rattanakiri province, after they were stopped from presenting their complaint during his visit on a land-titling campaign. Hun Sen was ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Friday distributed 541 land titles covering 1,308 hectares to 301 mostly ethnic minority families in Andong Meas district. ...

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 ...

Discussions on restarting World Bank loans to Cambodia will not commence until after the 2013 elections, a bank official said yesterday. After a landmark freeze on loans announced in December 2010, a response to the forced evictions by the government of residents of the Boeung Kak ...

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 ...

Eight representatives of Phnom Penh communities involved in land disputes were allowed to present their petitions to the Council of Ministers yesterday after authorities blocked about 200 of their fellow petitioners from gathering in front of the Peace Palace. During a meeting with the representatives, Bun ...

Opposition party whip Son Chhay reiterated his call at a press conference yesterday for the government to raise taxes on economic land concessions from $5 to $7 a hectare up to $70 through an amendment to the draft of the 2013 budget. The Sam Rainsy Party ...

– Economic Land Concessions – ‘ELCs’ – ( Government Data Partial 4 items, and 1 Government Data Complete) Click here to download – Concessions for Mining (Secondary Source Data 10) Click here to download ...

The Cambodian National Rescue Party is making a strategic shift in its bid to win the next election: focusing less on traditional hot-button issues like government corruption and territorial disputes, and instead offering voters a series of concrete new policy initiatives. This required clear and ...

More than 100 people in Kratie province staged a peaceful protest on Sunday after excavators mobilized by a South Korean timber firm tried to clear and demarcate concession land, a commune official said yesterday. The company, Think Biotech, was granted 34,000 hectares of land on May ...

Following our investigation which highlighted allegations of human rights abuses in Cambodia’s sugar industry, activists are stepping up their campaign against sugar companies buying from the region. The call to boycott sugar company Tate and Lyle over allegations of illegal land seizures and human rights ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has reclassified 4,158 hectares of a massive land concession owned by the wife of Senator Lao Meng Khin from his own party for displaced families in Kampong Chhnang province. A jubilant representative of the 4,506 families who have long battled against ...

Land disputes are expected to be a hot issue in next year’s election, overshadowing perennial issues such as illegal immigration, destruction of forests, corruption, and unemployment. Prime Minister Hun Sen himself has acknowledged that the government’s failure to resolve the issue will mean handing ammunition to ...

Rights groups said they will continue to advocate in land grabbing and eviction cases, and villagers involved in such disputes said they will continue to turn to NGOs for help despite a warning by Prime Minister Hun Sen for civil society to stay clear of ...

They’re known as the BK13 and they’re not prepared to let greedy developers take the very, very little they have. They’re 13 women – mothers, grandmothers – who live around what used to be Boeung Kak Lake – not far from the centre of Cambodia’s ...