Agro-industrial production

Some of the hundreds of families losing land and community forest to Vietnamese-owned rubber plantations in Cambodia’s northeast will this week file a complaint with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) over the investment it has made in the plantations’ parent company. Eang Vuthy, executive director of ...

The director of a CPP senator’s sugar plantation accused of stealing land from hundreds of families said Wednesday that most locals were happy with the new jobs the plantation has generated, a week after a visiting European Union parliamentarian renewed calls for an investigation of ...

Four villagers locked in a land dispute with an agribusiness firm in Banteay Meanchey province said Tuesday that they had been summonsed to the provincial court over a property damage lawsuit filed by the company. The suit was originally filed last year, but villagers said they ...

Three Ministers from the Ministry of Urbanization and Construction, Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the Ministry of Environment have met to jointly set out work-plan to manage state’s land and natural resources. The work-plan will be undertaken in line with the Government’s land policy introduced ...

The government reforested 80,693 hectares of land between 2008 and 2012 as part of its efforts to combat deforestation, a recent agriculture ministry report says, but these seemingly impressive statistics were reached by counting rubber trees and other agricultural crops as adequate replacements for forests. The ...

Sugar plantations that benefit from the European Union’s Everything But Arms (EBA) scheme, which allows preferential access to the E.U.’s market, have further impoverished Cambodia’s poor, and an investigation needs to be launched, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) said on Friday. Patrice Tirolien, MEP ...

A member of the European Parliament is in Cambodia investigating agri-business firms accused of evicting hundreds of families while benefiting from a free-trade scheme with Europe worth millions of dollars, according to the NGO Equitable Cambodia. The visit from France’s Patrice Tirolien follows a resolution the ...

At least 41 new land disputes were reported in Cambodia last year despite a government moratorium on the widespread grant of so-called economic land concessions, a rights group said Thursday. The new cases in 17 locations—including the capital Phnom Penh—added to the 223 land conflicts previously ...

With a Cambodian delegation in Geneva defending its human rights efforts, a minority group in Preah Vihear province is calling for the cancellation of two licenses for Chinese companies accused of grabbing thousands of hectares of land. ...

A world class Japanese Company, IDEMITSU, will build a bio-fuel factory in Cambodia in 2015, and will commence exploring bio-fuel in Cambodia for the first time in 2017, Mr. Heng Ratana, General Director of Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC) told reporters yesterday. IDEMITSU has been ...

A newly demarcated wildlife and forest protection zone designed to safeguard Cambodia’s national bird, the giant ibis, along with a number of other endangered species, has been approved after more than 10 years in the making. A government sub-decree approving a protection zone spanning 66,932 hectares ...

Villagers involved in a land dispute in Battambang province on Monday temporarily detained six men working for an agribusiness firm who were preparing the disputed land to be cleared, residents and police said. The six workers were using mine detectors to check for unexploded ordnance in ...

The Banteay Meanchey Provincial Court laid fresh charges of money laundering on the detained chairman of an embattled British investment firm on Friday, the same day that a provincial official was arrested in relation to fraud charges the businessman was already facing, a court official ...

Three rights monitors filed an attempted murder lawsuit against a Mondulkiri land concessionaire employee on Wednesday, after he violently denied them access to an area under investigation for forest crimes, Adhoc said yesterday. The stand-off comes on the heels of a second potentially violent confrontation ...

Twenty families from Ratanakkiri’s Kon Mom district are seeking intervention after a private company allegedly encroached on 10 hectares of their land. The unnamed company produces furniture from wood acquired from embattled Vietnamese concessionaire Hoang Anh Andong Meas, and over the course of the last two ...

Government officials have agreed to speed up the delivery of land titles promised to some 1,500 families in Kratie province after about 200 of them, angered by the months-long delay, protested outside their local commune office Monday. The protesters said they had their land measured in ...

Ethnic minority groups in Ratanakkiri province are facing widespread human rights violations, land loss and the exploitation of their natural resources, an indigenous peoples conference was told yesterday. More than 300 villagers from the province’s Tum Poun, Kreng, Prov, Kavet, Jarai, Kachok and Lun communities hosted ...

Security guards from a Chinese development firm in Koh Kong province have allegedly prevented civil society groups from gathering data they planned to use for a petition asking for compensation for evictees. ...

The constant hum of chainsaws almost drowned out Buddhist monk Sam Kim Sath, 65, as he stood this week in a wildlife sanctuary on Oral Mountain, Cambodia’s highest peak. Forest in the Phnom Oral Wildlife Sanctuary, in the eastern part of the Cardamoms, is being “obliterated” ...

A representative of the Try Pheap Group said Tuesday that villagers in Pursat province who attempted to march to a public forum on Monday to ask authorities to intervene in a land dispute would not receive any further compensation after losing the right to the ...

The Kompong Speu Provincial Court has summoned for trial a married couple accused of encroaching on land excised from a plantation belonging to CPP Senator and businessman Ly Yong Phat, and has issued more than two dozen other summonses and arrest warrants in the past ...

The Vietnamese embassy fired back yesterday at opposition party leader Sam Rainsy’s claim that Vietnamese companies granted economic land concessions in Prey Lang forest are turning the area into a Vietnamese “colony”. On Wednesday, Rainsy visited the forest and claimed that CRCK, a Vietnamese firm granted ...

Since 2011, an estimated 3,000 resin trees have been illegally razed by rogue loggers and a land concessionaire operating in Mondulkiri’s Sen Monorom district, villagers claimed yesterday. Resin trees are a vital source of income for the Phnong ethnic community in Sokdom commune, according to Thleuk ...

Credit Suisse, a financial services firm based in Switzerland, has been accused of aiding land grabbing in Cambodia by becoming a major shareholder in Vietnamese rubber giant Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) Group. In a statement released today, Global Witness (GW), an NGO based in England, ...