Agriculture

Green Trade, a state-owned, milled-rice exporter, had not been updated on a government-to-government rice deal with the Philippines despite recent media reports that claimed a deal was near. ...

The Philippines is close to signing a government-to-government rice supply agreement that would make Cambodia a potential supplier of the grain staple to Manila, along with Vietnam and Thailand, agriculture officials said on Monday. The Southeast Asian neighbours aimed to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) ...

BETAGRO Group, one of Thailand’s largest integrated agro-industry businesses, announced this week that its US$16.3 million animal feed plant in Cambodia is 95 percent complete. The plant, 12 kilometers from Phnom Penh, will initially produce 12,000 tonnes of animal feed per year, but that number ...

About 50 people protested in front of Pailin Provincial Hall yesterday against a government plan to turn their farmland in Sala Krao district into a special economic zone (SEZ), villagers and officials said. “It is the villagers that abuse the government land. They took the ...

Kampong Thom province Police and soldiers have been deployed to Prey Lang forest to monitor the activities of about 500 villagers patrolling for illegal loggers, a police official said yesterday. The police and military officers gathered along a road leading to the CRCK rubber company, which has ...

Kampong Thom province About 500 frustrated villagers, citing the authorities’ inaction as their motivation, rode some 250 motorbikes into Prey Lang forest over the weekend in yet another effort to combat illegal logging they say is decimating the area. The villagers from four provinces surrounding Prey Lang ...

A total of 36 protests involving economic land concessions ended with violent intervention from armed authorities last year, according to data released this week by local rights group Adhoc. More than a fifth of the cases involved the long-simmering Boeng Kak lake evictions, in which ...

More than 2 million of the Kingdom’s nearly 18 million hectares of land – roughly 12 per cent – was given out to 225 private companies in economic concessions last year, according to an annual report released by rights group Adhoc yesterday. The concessions put 606 ...

The government has already granted roughly 300,000 hectares in economic land concessions (ELC) so far this year, according to data released by a local rights group yesterday. The figure, which amounts to 40 percent of the total land concessions granted in all of 2011, has ...

Though less well-known than Kampot pepper, the price of Kompong Cham province pepper has increased by 44 percent from last year and is developing a following in Thailand, farmers and vendors said. With a total of 906 hectares of land dedicated to cultivating pepper in Kompong ...

Cambodia is importing hundreds of tons of silk from China and Vietnam to compensate for a fast-declining domestic industry, which is suffering due to producers opting to grow other crops instead or raising silk worms, according to silk producers. Men Sinoeun, director of the Artisans’ Association ...

The government has granted private companies the right to develop about 65,000 hectares of land in wildlife sanctuaries, national parks and on public reserves since January 1, data from a human rights group reveals. Ouch Leng, land reform project coordinator for the Cambodian Center for Human ...

The government last month granted four companies a total 23,000 hectares of land concessions for agro-industry projects and a special economic zone (SEZ), according to human rights groups, which said it obtained the information from government documents. An additional 500 hectares inside a wildlife sanctuary were ...

Agricultural officials and farmers in Kampong Thom province are increasingly worried about the adverse effect that a severe drought is having on more than 200 hectares of rice crops. director of the provincial agricultural department, told the Post yesterday that due to an unusually low amount ...

Two workers were blinded and three others were injured on Saturday after a fire they built on a cassava plantation in Kratie province set off an unexploded ordnance (UXO), Pi Thnou commune police chief Sum Hon said yesterday. ...

Salt farmers in Kampot and Kep may be unable to harvest the roughly 90,000 tons they sell annually due to excessive rains, and the country may have to turn to foreign markets, producers said yesterday. Ly Sreng, deputy chief of the Kep-Kampot Salt Producers Community, ...

The decreasing amount of farmers harvesting soybeans last year has limited supply and raised prices at the markets roughly 42 percent to 4,000 riel per kg, or about $1, according to an agricultural official and farmers. Cheam Chan Sorphaon, director of the provincial agriculture department in ...

The value of approved agricultural projects in 2011 increased by more than 30 per cent compared to the year before, according to data from the Council for the Development of Cambodia. The CDC approved 24 projects worth US$724.9 million last year, $674 million of which was ...

About 400 villagers in Kratie province’s Chhlong district protested yesterday in an effort to stop Kasten agro-industrial company from building houses on contested farmland, the protesters said. The company used red paint to demarcate its boundary and started building houses on the farmland in January, said ...

Kep province – On a sunny weekday in Kep, a seaside village about halfway along Cambodia’s coast, the crab market was heaving. Women in straw hats and rubber boots stood knee deep in the surf shouting out prices, periodically darting into the sea to pull writhing ...

Five cashew farmers in Ratanakkiri province will file a lawsuit against Hong An Mang Yang K Rubber Development Company today at the provincial court after the company mistakenly burned down 13 hectares of cashew trees last week, a human rights official said on Friday. With cashew ...

Last year saw a record increase in economic land concessions and the area controlled by agro-industrial companies jumped to more than 2 million hectares nationwide, according to human rights groups who track such projects. Mining companies are also flocking to Cambodia and those already have ...

The provincial office of rights group Licadho has called on Koh Kong provincial politicians to help more than 1,000 families being forcibly evicted to make way for a sprawling gambling resort and other development, representative said yesterday. More than 130 families, from three villages in Kiri ...

New limitations on Vietnamese exports of processed cashews and slowing demand on the international markets is expected to decrease the price of raw cashews by roughly 40 percent this year, sparking concerns among Cambodian farmers, who are now midway through the harvest season, traders and ...