Volunteering to Tackle the Intractable Issue of Land

Veun sai district, Ratanakkiri – Kitted out in their camouflage uniforms, military boots, belts and Ministry of Land Management baseball caps, the dozen or so student volunteers looked like a stern bunch. There was no smiling as they sat at wooden desks in an open pagoda hall, bundles of forms and papers neatly arranged, studiously registering the details of farmers who hope these young men will one day save their land—and livelihoods. Women with young infants on their knees arrived by motorcycles covered in red mud, a husband and wife in their thirties hitched a lift in a pick-up truck, their documents kept dry inside a yellow plastic bag. These were some of the almost 140 residents of Pong commune who had come in the past three days to participate in the government’s latest solution to what has become perhaps the most overriding social issue of the day: land loss and eviction. By registering their land with these volunteers, the hopeful farmers have been promised temporary ownership titles that will see their land protected inside the official boundary of an economic land concession in Veun Sai district that was granted to the SK Group—a private firm from India with Cambodian partners. Why a foreign company was even given land that was already owned and farmed by locals was not a question any of the students could answer—or seemed willing to either. And why well-meaning students were required to conduct land registrations that a small army of civil servants at the commune, district, province and national level were already responsible for, was another question that escaped them. …