Minorities complain to IFC over rubber farm funding
More than a dozen ethnic minority communities from Cambodia’s northeast filed a complaint with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) on Monday, accusing it of breaking its own safeguard policies by investing in rubber plantations they say are stealing their land and illegally logging their forests. The 17 communities say plantations in Ratanakkiri province belonging to Vietnam’s Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) have been grabbing their farms and clearing their community forests for years, destroying their way of life in the process. They want the IFC, the World Bank Group’s private sector investment arm, to use its stake in HAGL to make the plantations stop and return the land they have taken. … The 35-page complaint, prepared with the help of local NGOs, says the IFC has invested $27 million since 2002 in a Vietnamese fund, Dragon Capital, which in turn owns a 5.5 percent stake in HAGL. It accuses HAGL’s plantations of breaking a host of national and international laws and the IFC of breaking its policies to do no harm by giving the plantations the money with which to do it. … The complaint also accuses the plantations of failing to carry out impact assessments or to consult with the communities before starting work, all required under Cambodian law. … Its compliance ombudsman now has 15 days to tell the families that it has officially registered their complaint. After that, the ombudsman must decide whether to launch a compliance review. …
Aun Pheap and Zsombor Peter
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/minorities-complain-to-ifc-over-rubber-farm-funding-51868/
