Agriculture and fishing

Local communities that lost their land via economic land concessions to private companies are now being paid by those same firms to illegally fell the trees that once sustained their livelihoods, a group of five advocacy groups contended yesterday. At a press conference, the NGOs singled ...

Investors in drinks giant PepsiCo have filed a shareholders resolution urging the company to account for alleged land-rights violations in Cambodia. The 14 shareholders – including Oxfam – are increasing the pressure on PepsiCo following Coca-Cola’s pledge earlier this month of “zero tolerance” towards land grabs. An ...

Nearly 70 representatives from 278 families in Preah Vihear’s Rovieng district are seeking intervention after a national mining company began drilling on their farmland last week, locals said yesterday. According to villager Yean Bunchan, 47, representatives from a company based in Kandal province called T P ...

Villagers and local authorities continued to argue over a 4-hectare plot of land in Phnom Penh’s Russei Keo district on Monday, a day after officials promised to measure and issue a title for it. District council chief Prak Channa on Sunday promised to issue a land ...

A group of Cambodian NGOs threatened on Monday to expose more cases of forestry crime involving businessmen and the police, saying they were unshaken by a defamation suit filed by top tycoon accused of illegal logging and land-grabbing. Representatives of the five organizations told reporters Monday ...

Shelving any thoughts that 14 months in prison had deterred her from protesting, Yorm Bopha rushed to the capital’s Borei Keila community yesterday morning to try to stop authorities from forcing evictees from an abandoned building. Bopha was one of about 10 Boeung Kak activists called ...

Forty-two families from Preah Vihear province’s Chheb district on Sunday held a demonstration to protest their pending eviction in favor of a Chinese company that plans to establish a sugarcane plantation on the land the families have occupied for almost three years. Local authorities have told ...

Tycoon Try Pheap has filed a defamation complaint against two people quoted in an NGO report released last week that accused him of illegal logging and widespread land grabbing, summonses obtained yesterday reveal. The documents, bearing the signature of Kandal Provincial Court prosecutor Sam Rithy Veasna, ...

Like most millennium-old structures discovered in the forests of Cambodia, the locals had known all along about this one. Jarai minority villagers in this remote spot in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Yadaw district not only knew about it, but they revered the red-brick temple, using it as a ...

The Vietnamese Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) company, the majority shareholder of several economic land concessions in Ratanakkiri province, on Friday rebuffed accusations that it had logged forests and forced evictions, claiming that its activities improved the environment and the livelihoods of locals. Through several companies, ...

The assistant of a lumber tycoon accused of major deforestation and forced evictions rejected Thursday the findings of a recent report by local rights groups. The Cambodian Human Rights Task Force said in its report that some 1,400 families had been pushed from their land by ...

The Ministry of Environment on Thursday denied that a private agro-industry firm had been issued an “unofficial” land concession inside Ratanakkiri province’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary, as stated on Monday by the provincial governor. In response to claims by local officials that Daun Penh Agrico Co. Ltd. ...

Cambodian Jasmine rice wins the award for world’s best rice at the 2013 Rice Traders World Rice Conference held in Hong Kong. This is the second time that Cambodian rice had been awarded world’s best rice, the first award came last year in Bali, Indonesia. ...

A district-level Environment Ministry official in Ratanakkiri province on Wednesday claimed that he had no way to determine the legality of logging operations by firms with private land concessions inside the province’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary. The claim by Chou Sopheak, director of Lumphat district’s environment department, ...

As salt farmers in Kep and Kampot provinces prepare for the upcoming salt season, they have expressed concerns that unstable weather conditions could cause a supply shortage on the growing domestic market. Salt production in Cambodia usually starts in early January and ends in late ...

The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has released a nine-month status report on 2013’s illegal timber seizures, saying it had confiscated, among other things, more than 2,000 kilograms of rosewood – a figure that represents only a tiny fraction of seizures reported by the Post this ...

An “unofficial” land concession granted earlier this year to an agro-industry firm that has logged luxury hardwood in Ratanakkiri province’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary is in violation of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s 2012 moratorium on new economic land concessions (ELCs), a government spokesman said Tuesday. Phay Siphan, ...

Logging tycoon Try Pheap’s rapidly expanding land empire, criticised by rights groups for displacing families and encroaching on protected forest areas, has grown to almost 70,000 hectares in size and is helping to facilitate a cross-border illegal logging operation, a report released today alleges. The Cambodian ...

Fifty-three families in Preah Vihear province’s Kulen district on Sunday protested outside the headquarters of a Malaysian company that is threatening to clear villagers’ farmland to make way for a rubber plantation, rights groups and officials said Monday. The families, who live in Srayong commune’s Srayong ...

Vietnam has joined Cambodia in questioning the sustainability of the planned Don Sahong dam project on the Mekong River in southern Laos, saying more environmental impact studies are needed before the scheme moves forward. Le Duc Trung, director general of the Vietnam National Mekong Committee under ...

Vietnamese rubber firm Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) has failed to keep its commitments to address human rights and environmental abuses at its plantations in Cambodia, Global Witness said in a statement yesterday. In May, the London-based NGO published an investigation into two Vietnamese rubber companies ...

Environmental campaign group Global Witness on Thursday called on the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Deutsche Bank to divest immediately from a Vietnamese firm whose rubber plantations in Cambodia are accused of rampant illegal logging and forced evictions of indigenous communities. The call came exactly six ...

Laos is pushing ahead with construction of a second dam on the Mekong River despite objections from environmental and civil society groups. Work on the main part of the Don Sahong hydropower dam near the Cambodian border in southern Laos will begin by the end of ...

Koh Kong Sugar has offered to settle its yearslong dispute with Cambodian families who accuse its plantations of stealing their land, but the farmers remain wary of being able to secure a fair deal. The firm, a subsidiary of Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar Industry Limited (KSL), ...