Agriculture

The new list of reforms approved by the government at a high-level meeting with its foreign donors on Wednesday offer a mixed bag of targets, with some sectors, such as education, given more ambitious goals than before, while others had their ambitions scaled back and old goals ...

It has been more than two years since the Cambodian government issued a rice export policy in June 2010, aiming to export a million tonnes of milled rice by 2015. However, a shortage of capital to buy unmilled rice, known as “paddy”, together with high ...

While the global economic crisis weakened the ability of Cambodian households to purchase food, the government’s focus on agricultural production and other policies have since helped alleviate food insecurity in the country, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development said in a new report. Between June ...

Cambodia will receive a grant of US$3.3 million from the World Trade Organisation to support rice milling, silk production and development of the Department of International Cooperation, according to Heng Sovannarith, communication officer for Trade Wide Sector Approach. Sovannarith said the Ministry of Commerce would receive the grant from ...

U.N. representatives from Japan, the European Union and Australia called on Cambodia to heed recommendations made in a report on human rights and economic land concessions by the U.N.’s envoy Surya Subedi at the Human Rights Council in Geneva Tuesday. While the E.U. commended Cambodia ...

While protesters demonstrated outside, urging land and human-rights reform, members of the donor community met with the government yesterday at the Council for the Development of Cambodia in Phnom Penh to sign off on a series of development targets that bore only a faint resemblance to those ...

Two studies have found that development on Bokor Mountain in Kampot province is threatening some of the area’s plant and animal species. The Sokimex Group has been granted development rights for the entire mountain and in May, the first of three hotels to be built ...

Five metric tonnes of certified organic rice — the first such shipment from Cambodia — will depart for the European Union this Friday. The shipment, exported from Cambodia by an entity called Green Trade, comprises three tonnes of brown rice and two tonnes of white jasmine ...

Economic land concessions (ELCs) benefit only a minority, the human rights consequences of the concessions are stark, and Cambodia’s sustainable economic development is threatened by the practice. U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi told the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday. Mr. Subedi cited uneven access to ...

Cambodia’s economic land concession (ELC) policies are hindering development far more than helping it and beginning to erode the country’s hard-won stability, Cambodia’s special rapporteur warned yesterday. “As I have noted in relation to other sectors in Cambodia, the existence of the legal framework on paper ...

At least five people were killed and some 15,510 families have been affected by flash floods that have been hitting the country’s Banteay Meanchey province since earlier this month, the latest report of the National Committee for Disaster Management (NCDM) showed Tuesday Some 14,300 houses have ...

Rural Cambodian communities are seeing economic benefits as a result of a biomass and farming resilience project run by GERES, a French NGO. As part of the AREA project, 200 households in Kampong Chhnang province are growing 22 varieties of trees to negate the effects of ...

The price of rubber jumped to $2,500 per tonne last week after months of the commodity steadily dropping, industry analysts reported. The jump of $100 a tonne, or 4.2 per cent, comes after the price for rubber dropped in June from above $3,000 per tonne, according ...

The Kompong Chhnang Provincial Court has summoned four villagers embroiled in a long-running land dispute over charges of alleged incitement  and violence involving a company owned by the wife of government minister, a court official said yesterday. Two summoned vllagers, from Kompong Tralach district’s Ta Ches commune, faced similar ...

Among thousands of residents in the Boeung Kak Lake district of the capital whose land has been targeted for redevelopment by a Chinese-financed real estate company, Tep Vanny carried a letter explaining the “sadness and suffering” caused by the project — which has turned Phnom ...

A Malaysian company has been granted three tracts of land totaling more than 23,000 hectares for oil palm and rubber plantations in Preah Vihear province, according to documents submitted to the Malaysian stock exchange. The acquisition flout the legal maximum of concession land that a single ...

Boeung Kak and Borei Keila villagers embroiled in longstanding land disputes with two private companies in Phnom Penh say the authorities are protecting business interests over the public, as thousands of families lose their homes under forced evictions. This has turned the protesters and government officials ...

Khon Kaen Sugar Industry KSL.BK, Thailand’s fourth largest sugar producer, expects revenue could grow as much as a fifth next year, fuelled by expansion and a bumper sugarcane crop in 2012/13, the company’s chief executive said on Monday Chalush said sugar production from factories in Laos ...

AN HOUR’S drive south of Phnom Penh, deep in rural Cambodia, Chrek Heang is doing the rounds of his rapidly expanding poultry and fisheries business. Just four years ago he was living, like most of his countrymen, in a small wooden hut with a tin ...

An international rights group yesterday said the situation of human rights in Cambodia was continuing to worsen and accused the government of being “at war” with its own citizens over access to land. In its briefing paper, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) also said that Cambodia was ...

The Cambodian Investment Board approved nearly $850 million worth of investment projects between the start of the year and the end of July, data from the Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC) shows. According to the data, 90 projects worth $845.26 million were approved during the first ...

Charoen Pokphand Group is leaning towards investing more in Indochinese countries in light of their growing economies and regional trade liberalisation through the Asean Economic Community in 2015. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam have a wealth of natural resources that could support the group’s products from ...

Residents of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak and Borei Keila communities delivered petitions to the offices of the European Union and World Bank yesterday in their ongoing attempts to enlist Cambodia’s aid donors in their efforts to have jailed anti-eviction activists released from Prey Sar prison. ...

An ongoing project to build hotels, luxury villas and a casino on Kampot province’s Bokor Mountain is a threat to the area’s unique animal and plant species, according to two new studies. Local conglomerate Sokimex Group has been granted property development rights on the entire mountain, ...