Agricultural production

In the weeks that 17-year-old garment worker Yon Chea languished in prison, he spent hours staring out of the window at a concrete wall, certain that he would never see his home or his family again. “I never thought I would get out. There was a ...

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 ...

Amid falling local production in Italy, officials there are calling on the European Union to scrap a preferential trade agreement that gives Cambodia’s rice exports duty-free advantages in the global market. According to a January 31 report from rice industry publication Oryza, members of the Italian ...

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 ...

Cambodia has seen a 34 percent rise in dry rubber export last year thanks to rising demand globally, the figures of the Ministry of Commerce showed Thursday. The country had exported 74,200 tones of dry rubber last year, up 34 percent from 55,344 tones in a ...

Three NGOs on Wednesday called on ANZ Royal Bank to help the hundreds of families who have lost farmland to a sugar plantation that the bank helped to finance in Kompong Speu province. The NGOs also made public a 2013 social and environmental impact assessment of ...

Cambodia exported 2.9 million tons of agricultural products last year, roughly the same as 2012, but experts say the figure does not reflect the huge potential for the market. According to official data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, exports included more than 1 ...

Cambodia had produced 9.3 million tons of paddy rice in 2013, which was comparable to the amount in 2012, according to the report of the Ministry of Agriculture on Thursday.​ Hean Vanhorn, director of the single window secretariat for facilitating milled rice exports, called on ...

Cambodia’s Minister of Commerce Sun Chanthol said Tuesday that the country is expected to achieve its goal of exporting one million tons of milled rice in 2015. “The country had exported more than 400,000 tons in 2013 and there is two years more toward the goal, ...

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 ...

Palm sugar farmers in Kampong Speu province will soon export their goods to South Korea, the senior officer of a grower’s network said on Monday. Sam Saroeun, president of the Kampong Speu Palm Sugar Promotion Association, said an agreement with the Korea Trade Investment Promotion Agency ...

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 ...

Rice exports increased from 205,717 tons in 2012 to 378,856 tons in 2013 as a result of high demand from the European Union as well as countries in Asia, according to figures released Thursday by the Ministry of Agriculture. France imported the most Cambodian milled rice, ...