News

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Friday criticized U.S. threats to cut aid to the impoverished Southeast Asian nation if its election wasn’t free and fair, and dared American lawmakers to follow through on their warning. His comments came after U.S. lawmakers started processes in the ...

Many restaurants, shops, supermarkets and tourist sites in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap will operate at a limited capacity or close entirely this Sunday as Cambodians line up at voting stations to elect a new government. Despite the closures, Ang Kim Eang, president of the ...

Phnom Penh International Airport’s navigation system will be upgraded today with the installment of a new satellite-based system that aims to improve efficiency and reduce fuel usage, an aviation official said. Chhun Sivorn, director of the Air Navigation Standards and Safety Department of the State Secretariat ...

Economic diversification is attracting substantial sums of FDI from China and beyond. Rich in history and culture and blessed with wonderful natural and human resources that are driving its impressive economic growth and attracting record sums of foreign direct investment (FDI), the Kingdom of Cambodia offers ...

Since last year, up to a half of nearly 8,000 hectares of community forest has been encroached upon and cleared in Oddar Meanchey province’s Banteay Ampil district by soldiers, community representatives said yesterday. Din Heng, chief of Ang Dong Bor community, said the army has cleared ...

Romam Gvin could be described as a counterintuitive voter. Intuition might lead you to believe that Mr. Gvin blames the government for the loss of his land to the Vietnamese rubber company that now owns everything for as far as the eye can see here in ...

Cambodia’s rice harvest is forecast to reach 9.1 million tonnes this year, down from an estimated 9.3 million tonnes last year but up from 8.8 million tonnes in 2011, the Food and Agricultural Organization said Thursday. The estimates were contained in the UN agency’s quarterly Crop ...

Staff at eight factories producing footwear for Japanese sportswear brand ASICS were trained Tuesday in how to make sure they are not employing child laborers, a company representative said. ASICS corporate staff have been in Cambodia this week in a bid to overcome the negative publicity ...

Forty-four Number One and OK condom packers, out of work since their contracts ended on Sunday, protested outside the office of health NGO Population Services Khmer (PSK) in Phnom Penh yesterday, demanding “unpaid” seniority bonuses. Representative So Nita said the workers, four of whom have physical ...

A mid [sic] global economic fragility, foreign direct investment (FDI) in Cambodia grew a whopping 73 per cent in 2012 from the year before, a huge increase helping to fuel a record-setting amount of money pouring into least developed countries, according to the United Nations ...

Two UN agencies praised Cambodia’s Fisheries Administration Thursday as an “example of success” for addressing child labour in fisheries. In a joint report, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Labour Organization recalled that the fisheries agency began raising awareness of ...

The Fisheries Administration and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on Friday officially launched a program to protect Cambodia’s coastline from over-fishing, erosion and other damage to coastal environments and livelihoods. Since the beginning of the year, the program has been training local officials ...

The government does little to protect the rights and livelihoods of the country’s many ethnic minorities who are under constant threat from rapid development, representatives of indigenous groups said yesterday. “We have polices laws and guidelines to protect indigenous people, but we see that it doesn’t ...

Cambodia posted the sharpest increase in production among the world’s major rice producers between 2000 and 2010, the Food and Agricultural Organization said in a report released Wednesday. The 2013 edition of the UN agency’s Statistical Yearbook showed that Cambodia was the world’s 12th largest rice ...

The world’s poorest nations have won an eight-year extension of a waiver on intellectual property rules at a session of the World Trade Organisation’s TRIPS Council. A session of the 159-nation WTO’s TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) Council has ruled the waiver for 34 ...

A land titling campaign in Cambodia launched and financed by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s lacks transparency and could leave thousands of people landless, a human rights group said Wednesday, urging the country’s donors to push for reform of the program. The campaign, which employs volunteer youth ...

A national silk board (NSB) under the Ministry of Commerce is being planned to weave tighter regulations into the Kingdom’s silk industry, the lack of which has deterred investors and hurt its export potential, according to industry representatives. Minister of Commerce Cham Prasidh said last week ...

More than 300 ethnic Jarai families from Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadav district in longstanding land disputes with two Vietnamese land concessionaires submitted a petition to UN human rights officers yesterday asking for help. Village representative Romas Chvat said locals were participating in an NGO-led workshop on protest ...

As Cambodia assesses its development goals, a study has found that many Cambodians want to see an improved judicial system, better education, improved agriculture and more human rights. A broad consortium of local and international development agencies spent the early part of the year conducting conferences ...

Despite the apparent spontaneity of a protest against U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi at a university in Phnom Penh on Tuesday night, it emerged Wednesday that one of the apparent leaders of the demonstration is associated with a youth organization aligned with the ruling ...

U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi on Tuesday received a thorny reception from hundreds of students at a Phnom Penh university, who angrily questioned his impartiality and unfurled banners calling for him to end his work in Cambodia. Special rapporteur Subedi delivered a lecture to about ...

Cambodia has seen huge growth of foreign aid and loans over the past two decades, but experts are beginning to question its worth—and what conditions might be attached. Total aid from 1993 to 2012 amounts to around $10 billion, with the percentage of aid coming as ...

Cambodian migrant workers sent home $256 million last year, according to a report from a U.N. agency and the World Bank, which was released in Bangkok yesterday. The report from the bank and Rome-based International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), titled Sending Money Home to Asia, ...

Satiating the demands of the global sugar industry is big business for Cambodia’s sugarcane plantations. Yet accusations of human rights abuses and land grabs in the Kingdom have left a bitter aftertaste for many on the ground as companies vie for a larger slice of ...