Agriculture and fishing
Agriculture
Vulnerable evictees speak out
An 11-year-old HIV-positive girl evicted from Borei Keila moved back to Phnom Penh to live with her aunt because she had no access to medication at her relocation site in Kandal province, she said yesterday. During another day of protests outside the National Assembly, schoolgirl Theng ...
Oversupply leads to a fall in pork prices
Pig prices in Cambodia have fallen by 18 percent in the past three months due to a massive oversupply of pork in the country, an official at the Cambodian Pig Raisers Association said yesterday. The reason for the oversupply is twofold: Thailand increased its pig exports ...
Footage shows chaos, panic during shooting
Dramatic new video footage of the January 18 Kratie province land dispute shooting has been released on the internet, depicting TTY rubber company security guards opening fire on a crowd of unarmed villagers. The 48-second video, recorded by a villager on a mobile phone and uploaded ...
Firms, gov't discuss $50m banana farm plan
Plans for a 5,000-hectare banana farming project in Koh Kong province, proposed last year by an Australian and a Japanese company, look set to go ahead, with state news agency Agence Kampuchea Presse (AKP) yesterday reporting that the project would cost $50 million. Last Friday, the ...
Evictees mark 3rd anniversary of Dey Krahorm
More than 300 demonstrators yesterday marked the third anniversary of the forced eviction of Phnom Penh’s Dey Krahorm community, one of the city’s most violent land evictions. Five international rights groups also sent a letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen urging the government to stop land ...
Milled rice exports fall in January
Some of Cambodia’s biggest exporters have experienced a sizeable decline in milled-rice shipments this month, with one insider putting the number as high as 40 per cent year-on-year. The waning figure stands in stark contrast to last year’s milled-rice export numbers, which increased about 22 per ...
Villagers wary of Pheapimex olive branch
A deadly land dispute in Pursat province ended over the weekend with a victory for the villagers, but they said yesterday this might have more to do with the upcoming commune elections than a change of heart within the company owned by the wife of ...
Company backtracks, says villagers will now get land
The director of TTY rubber company, whose guards shot four land protestors in Kratie province last week, said he will give land back to the protesting villagers, backtracking on his vow Friday not to give up any of the land granted to him by the ...
2011 rubber prices surge 132 per cent on demand
Cambodia’s 2011 rubber exports and export prices grew by 5.5 per cent and 131 per cent respectively, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce obtained by the Post. The data shows rubber exports last year totalled 46,727 tonnes, compared to 30,040 tonnes in 2010. Export ...
Villagers set to regain land
Villagers from Kratie province, who blocked National Road 76a last week after four of their own were shot by guards working for agro-development firm TTY, appear to be on their way to receiving farmland they lost to the company in an economic land concession. A statement ...
Farming group to quadruple organic production
The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (Cedac) said yesterday that it plans to raise its annual production of organic vegetables from 120 tons to 600 tons by the end of 2015. Lim Sokun Darun, program coordinator at Cedac, said that the decision to ...
Damages from mine to cost at least $4m
The government said yesterday that a gold mine in Kompong Cham province that has damaged about 1 square km of land with chemical waste would cost at least $4 million to clean up. Speaking at a workshop in Phnom Penh on revenue transparency, Sim Sisokhaly, director ...
Courts step up charges in land disputes
The number of criminal charges meted out to villagers embroiled in land disputes rose by more than 50 percent in 2011 compared to the previous year, according to figures released by the rights group Adhoc yesterday. The rights group found that the courts charged 475 villagers ...
Soldiers shoot villagers over land protest
Violence erupted yesterday in Kratie province’s Snuol district where six people were shot and injured when RCAF soldiers working for a rubber company opened fire on a crowd of villagers who were trying to stop the company from clearing land in the area, police and ...
Land grants affected 11,377 families in 2011, rights groups say
More than 11,000 families were affected by government-granted economic land concessions in 2011, nearly 3,000 more families than were affected the previous year, according to figures released yesterday by local rights group Licadho. A total of more than 2 million hectares of the country’s forests and ...
Firm refuses housing pleas
The owner of development firm Phan Imex Company said yesterday that 64 families from the capital’s Borei Keila community who were demanding compensation for houses demolished on January 3 did not have the documents to prove they had owned a house on the site. Phan Imex ...
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2012011854001/National-news/firm-refuses-housing-pleas.html
Thailand's second-largest rice exporter invests $47m in mills
Asia Golden Rice (AGR), Thailand’s second-largest rice exporter, will invest $47 million to build milling plants in Cambodia capable of processing up to 1 million tons of rice per year, according to a company representative and reports from the Thai news media yesterday. “This will be ...
Locals protest Pheapimex land clearance; deny role in murder
About 200 villagers, who have been embroiled in a long-running land dispute with the well-connected agro-business Pheapimex over a 316,000-hectare economic land concession in Pursat province, staged a protest yesterday against the company’s continued efforts to clear their farmland. The protests came just three days after ...
No sign World Bank will renew funds
Just over a year since the World Bank froze its funds to the government, the bank yesterday reiterated that a decision on whether or not it would start providing loans again remains nowhere in sight. In August, the World Bank announced that it would not provide ...
Croc skins new focus for farmers
Crocodile farmers in Siem Reap are turning away from the export of hatchlings to Vietnam, choosing instead sell the reptiles for their skins. Luon Nam, president of the province’s Crocodile Feeding Association, said yesterday the reliance on Vietnam was an unsustainable strategy for the industry. Any change ...
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2011122853645/Business/croc-skins-new-focus-for-farmers.html
Kingdom takes steps to attract milled-rice buyers
A nationwide survey was under way by the Ministry of Commerce’s Rice Exporter Union to measure Cambodia’s milled-rice industry in order to give international buyers an accurate picture of the Kingdom’s current capacity, insiders said yesterday. Although data for the survey was still being collected, those ...
Investment needed to hit rice target
Cambodia needs at least another $120 million of investment in rice mills if it is to meet the government’s 2015 target of exporting 1 million tons of rice, Agriculture Minister Chan Sarun said yesterday. While rice exports from Cambodia this year have seen a significant increase ...
Hun Sen calls off deals on protected land
Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday ordered an end to all private land deals inside the country’s protected areas and warned local businessmen and officials against making such illegal deals. “All official paperwork in connection with natural protected areas is invalid,” he said while speaking at the ...
Cambodian rice output grows in 2011 despite floods
Cambodia’s total paddy rice output reached 8.4 million tonnes in 2011, up from 8.25 million tonnes last year, according an initial assessment by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Provincial MAFF officials from across the Kingdom met in Phnom Penh on Saturday, when data was ...