The Cambodia Daily

Cambodia is facing a grave labor shortage due to the large number of workers seeking jobs in Thailand, Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday, urging employers to help reduce illegal migration by improving working conditions at home. Mr. Hun Sen also applauded growing Japanese investment in ...

Trade between Cambodia and South Korea has risen by almost 40 percent in 2012, a South Korean trade official said. Ki Bong-moon manager of the trade and investment unit at the intergovernmental body the Asean-Korea Centre, said in an email on Sunday that trade between ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has again ordered local officials to step up their efforts to stop illegal timber being cut down and transported from Cambodia’s forest’s in response to an apparent rise in forest crimes. Thousands of cubic meters of luxury wood, as well as ...

Sixty families in Kompong Cham province’s Krathor district are planning to file a complaint with provincial authorities after local land management officials decided to take away their registration documents for land titles under Prime Minister Hun Sen’s recently launched titling program. Pon Pumm, 44 a farmer, ...

Widely different interpretations of the government’s land policy were voiced at a conference on Land Security and Housing Rights on Thursday in Phnom Penh, with civil servants defending mass relocations, while rural evictees spoke of being forced into poverty due to loss of their land. ...

The government-backed Rural Development Bank has handed a $4.5 million loan to a company planning to invest in Cambodia’s efforts to export more milled rice. Rural Development Bank chairman Son Kuon Thor said yesterday that the bank was giving the loan to a new company ...

Cambodia is in need of more skilled workers in order for the economy to grow and move beyond basic manufacturing jobs, the Asia Development Bank (ADB) said in a new report. “The skills demand in Cambodia is for low-skilled workers, and this demand reinforces the current ...

There was so much noise blasting from the loudspeakers that the occasional rallying cry from striking workers at the demonstration in Phnom Penh’s Dangkao district last week could hardly be heard. One 2-meter high stack of amplifiers had been set up outside the Nex-T factory and ...

More than 250 ethnic Jarai families living in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Yadaw district filed a complaint with rights group Adhoc yesterday, after local officials demanded that the villagers apply for private land titles to protect their property from two Vietnamese rubber companies currently clearing their land, ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday criticized the Cambodian News Channel (CNC) for broadcasting an interview with an NGO worker who had claimed on air that the large number of illegal Cambodian workers to Thailand was due to high cost of obtaining a Cambodian passport. Speaking at ...

A 22.8 percent increase in the value of imports to Cambodia this year is partly due to a high demand for construction materials, a Commerce Ministry official said yesterday. In the first 11 months of 2012, total trade in and out of Cambodia reached $12.31 billion, ...

Canadian funding for ethnic minority communities in the process of applying for communal land titles will run out in March, and other donors have not yet signed up to take over the task, officials from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which currently provides the ...

The open-source mapping website Urban Voice launched a campaign yesterday against a government order banning Internet cafes withing 500 meters of schools that will effectively make it illegal to operate such businesses in much of Phnom Penh. “Implementation of this order would mean the closure of ...

Respecting labor standards in Cambodian factories will benefit the garment manufacturing industry in the long-run as more international brands will be tempted to source from the country, labor experts said yesterday at a round-table discussion in Phnom Penh. ...

More than 1,000 families in four communes in Kandal province’s Lvea Em district submitted a petition Sunday to local officials demanding that a private electricity company either lower its rates or the commune switch to cheaper state-run power, villagers and commune chiefs said yesterday. ...

The U.S. ambassador to Cambodia has sought to clear up supposed misinformation about Cambodia’s debt to the U.S., which was racked up during the early 1970s by the U.S.-backed military government of Lon Nol and has become a contentious issue between the country. Cambodia has refused ...

As Cambodia’s rice harvest gets into full swing, the government said yesterday that it expects this year’s crop to exceed last year’s, despite fears that drought would limit the yield. Minister of Agriculture Chan Sarun said that farmers had already harvested more than 3 million tons ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen appealed yesterday for developers and landowners in Kep City to build fences around their neglected properties to prevent vines from creeping onto the street of the coastal resort. Since much of the land in Kep City is owned by investors who live ...

The court system is still “chronically underfunded” and laws on its management are almost 20 years overdue, the U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi said yesterday. One year ago, during his sixth mission to Cambodia, Mr. Subedi described reform in the courts as moving at a ...

A final report from Thailand’s human rights commission on the alleged rights violations of a Thai company involved in two Cambodian sugar plantations is expected by late January, a member of the commission said. In July, the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand said its investigation ...

A representative of Vietnamese state-owned electricity giant Electricity Vietnam International (EVNI) confirmed yesterday that their stake in a dam project in Stung Treng province has been bought out by their Cambodian and Chinese business counterparts. While Royal Group chairman Kith Meng has maintained that EVNI still ...

The European Union’s ambassador to Cambodia yesterday urged the government to heed the advice of the U.N.’s visiting human rights envoy, who has come under increasing rebuke from officials for his unflattering reports. Addressing a crowd of about 3,000, mostly garment factory workers, at Phnom Penh’s ...

The Siem Reap City governor said yesterday that he would not allow a popular night market to be rebuilt after a deadly fire on Saturday razed it to the ground. “We cannot allow them to rebuild the market because this location is only suitable for ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday said that Cambodia’s budget for next year was balanced, claiming that a planned increase in public spending will be made up for by a rise in government revenue. Despite concerns from the opposition that foreign borrowing should be reduced, the National ...