News

Hundreds of students attending a forum yesterday on plans of regional governments to develop hydropower dams on the Mekong River expressed concern over the river’s future, and they urged the governments to abandon the projects or proceed with caution. The forum in Phnom Penh was the ...

Cambodia has one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation, ranking ninth among 180 countries in terms of forest loss during the past decade, according to a new study, which said that economic land concessions and illegal logging were the primary cause for the demise ...

Cambodia’s total exports rose more than 40 per cent year-on-year through October, carried by strong growth in agriculture shipments. Total exports reached US$4.05 billion in the first 10 months of 2011 compared with $2.82 billion during the same period last year, an increase of 44 per ...

On a night when some of France’s finest wines were consumed by some of Cambodia’s most senior officials, the message was clear: France wants to strengthen its economic ties with Cambodia. On Wednesday night, the French-Cambodian Chamber of Commerce (CCFC) put on a lavish display of ...

Cambodia’s 2012 budget passed through the National Assembly yesterday unopposed, without a single question asked and no parliamentary debate in a situation the government, opposition and observers all said was unfortunate. It took just over three hours for the law to be passed, 86 to 0, ...

The Ministry of Land Management and Urban Planning announced yesterday that it will soon complete a new draft sub-decree that aims to guide and regulate urban development in towns and cities. Land and human rights groups, however, criticized the ministry for failing to consult them on ...

Amnesty International yesterday launched a report on land evictions in Cambodia that details the impact that government-bestowed economic land concessions have had on women, and sets out recommendations for the government in light of those findings. The new report, titled ‘Eviction and Resistance in Cambodia: Five ...

Three Oddar Meanchey province villagers were shot to death on Monday while logging on the Thai-Cambodian border, officials said yesterday, bringing the total number of border killings so far this year to 14 and drawing concern from human rights groups over the continuing bloodshed around ...

Hattha Kaksekar Limited, one of Cambodia’s largest microfinance institutions, has received a US$5 million loan from a French development organisation in order to meet rising demand among its client farmers. PROPARCO, which is a joint venture between the French Development Agency and public and private shareholders, ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday rebuked the World Bank for revising downward its outlook for gross domestic product growth in the Kingdom, claiming the bank’s projections could cause market panic. The premier also announced a new government projection of 6.4 per cent GDP growth this year, ...

Police detained two unionists and broke up a protest in Siem Reap province yesterday where workers demanded the owners of the Angkor Village Hotel and Resort respect a court decision ordering them to reinstate 67 workers. On October 26, Siem Reap Municipal Court ruled that the ...

About 400,000 garment and footwear makers will get a US$5 a month raise starting in January, and the factories that employ them will receive a two-year tax holiday, Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday. The $5 raise, from $61 to $66 a month, is intended to ...

The government was urged yesterday not to start sending domestic helpers to Malaysia again until it had a Memorandum of Understand with Kuala Lumpur guaranteeing protection of Cambodian migrant workers there. Ya Navuth, executive director of Coordination of Action Research on Aids and Mobility, also said ...

As the harvest of the wet season rice crop gets under way in many parts of the country, rice prices have started to increase, rice millers said yesterday. They said prices were now up about 15 percent compared to the same time last year, but ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen Mnounced yesterday that the government would create a one-stop service office for rice millers and exporters in order to reduce red tape and help the country reach its lofty export target of a million tons of milled rice by 2015. “We cannot ...

An 18-year-old Battambang woman who was working as a maid in Malaysia has become the latest in a string of domestic workers to die there this year, and the second to die in less than a month, SRP lawmaker Mu Sochua and the woman’s family ...

Government Palace, the imposing gray headquarters of the Cambodia Development Council next to Wat Phnom, should be buzzing this morning with the country’s top foreign diplomats and government officials discussing aid and reform. Instead, with the government’s decision to indefinitely postpone this year’s Cambodian Development Cooperation ...

A Japan energy company yesterday said it planned to build a rice mill fuelled by rice husks in Cambodia’s Takeo province. New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kingdom’s Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy (MIME) confirming cooperation ...

Two Cambodian banks have set aside US$200 million for loans to bolster the Kingdom’s struggling rice-milling industry, officials said yesterday. The move comes as the Cambodian government has called on the private sector to boost loans to rice millers during the harvest season as a way ...

The father of an 18-year-old girl who he said had been missing in Malaysia for more than a year, has filed a complaint with the rights group Adhoc against the labour firm that sent her there. Minh Ngi, 46, from Preah Vihear province, said yesterday the ...

The government failed to evaluate social and environmental impacts before granting economic land concessions to private companies, while officials and company staff used the courts to intimidate residents during land disputes, representatives of NGOs said at a conference in the capital yesterday. “The courts are not ...

A group of about 30 families in Koh Kong province’s Botum Sakor district said yesterday that they would continue to resist attempts to evict them in order to make way for a Chinese mega-tourism project, unless authorities improve their compensation offer. Villager Prum Sann said the ...

Following their fourth protest in as many weeks, residents of Phnom Penh’s displaced Borei Keila community yesterday reached a tentative housing agreement with development firm Phanimex, company and village representatives said yesterday. The meeting came after a protest yesterday morning in which more than 100 residents ...

Forestry Administration officials yesterday said they confiscated 1.34 cubic meters of smuggled rosewood from RCAF soldiers even after a lieutenant colonel held a pistol to one of their heads in the hope of scaring them off. Tea Kimsoth, head of the administration’s Siem Reap cantonment, said ...