Cancel Prey Lang grants: SRP

Villagers protest against land concessions the government has granted in Prey Lang forest during a demonstration at the Freedom Park in Phnom Penh last week. (Photo by: Heng Chivoan)

Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Meas Sokchea
The Phnom Penh Post

Opposition Sam Rainsy Party lawmakers sent a letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday requesting that he cancel all economic land concessions in Prey Lang forest following public outcry over the issue.

The letter, signed by nine parliamentarians, singles out a 6,044-hectare concession to Vietnamese-owned CRCK Rubber Development Co Ltd, but also calls on the premier to cancel the other concessions in the forest. The lawmakers also suggested that the government support listing Prey Lang as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Hun Sen approved a 70-year lease for CRCK in September 2009. In May last year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries signed a contract with the company, and CRCK began clearing forest in order to make way for a rubber plantation early this year, according to reports from local residents.

In the letter, the SRP lawmakers cited signatures from 29,208 people from four provinces who requested their intervention in the matter.

Costello linked to controversial banana project

Peter Costello (Photo: Wikipedia)

Tue Apr 12, 2011
By South-east Asia correspondent Zoe Daniel
ABC News (Australia)

Environmental activists in Cambodia are opposing a multi-million dollar agribusiness proposal by a company associated with former treasurer Peter Costello.

They say the project will close off an internationally significant wildlife corridor.

But the company behind the banana plantation and reforestation project in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains says it will be sustainable and provide jobs and export income.

The mountain forests have been regenerating for the last 10 to 15 years after previously being selectively logged.

Cambodian forest group targets Australian firm

April 13, 2011
ABC Radio Australia

Wildlife campaigners in Cambodia are turning their attention to halting an Australian-backed banana plantation after they successfully stopped a controversial mining development.

The Cambodia Government surprised environmentalists by scrapping plans for a titanium mine in the Southern Cardamom Forest. The forest is home Cambodia's largest population of Asian elephants and dozens of endangered species. But despite the win, The Wildlife Alliance says the area remains under threat from clearing for agriculture.

Presenter: Liam Cochrane

Speaker: John Maloy, Wildlife Alliance spokesman

Click here to listen to the audio program (Windows Media)

COCHRANE: John Maloy, first of all let's address the issue of the titanium mine. What reasons were given for the government deciding not to go ahead with it?

MALOY: The government, in this case, the prime minister himself basically said that the environmental impact both on biodiversity and the potential affects on water resources as well as impacts on the local people Cardamoms were basically the reasons behind cancelling this concession.

COCHRANE: Did that decision take you by surprise?

MALOY: Completely, completely. We had been campaigning for months to stop this titanium mine and it received approval back in February, which actually also caught us by surprise, because it happened about two weeks before a meeting which was supposed to actually decide on whether this project was going to go ahead and even happened. So we were very much convinced that this project was a done deal and we're now working to try and minimise the damage that it would cause, but obviously this is a much better outcome.

Local farmers must not be forgotten in global land rush

Residents of the Boeung Kak lakeside during a protest in Phnom Penh, Cambodia against eviction. A local developer and a Chinese investment company have been given a 99-year lease from the Cambodian government to develop the lake. Photograph: Mak Remissa/EPA

Vast tracts of farmland in poor nations being gobbled up by foreign investors could undermine small farmers' rights and food security in the host countries

Thursday 31 March 2011

Darryl Vhugen

guardian.co.uk

From Ethiopia's lowlands to the hilltops of Madagascar, hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland in the developing world are being gobbled up by investors creating super-sized farms.

This high-stakes global land rush, which has the potential to transform, for good or ill, developing nations, is essentially a third wave of outsourcing.

The first wave, in the 70s and 80s, sent manufacturers scrambling to lower-wage countries; the second involved white-collar service jobs primarily to India and other English-speaking, low-wage countries.

Australian agro-deal in Cambodia carries risks, rewards

Mon, 01 Feb 2010
DPA

Phnom Penh - As a former finance minister of Australia, Peter Costello is comfortable with large numbers. The latest is his proposal on behalf of an Australian fund to invest 600 million US dollars into at least 100,000 hectares of land concessions in Cambodia. The concessions would see private equity investors pumping money into plantations of teak, palm oil, sugar, rice and bananas. In return, Cambodia would get 150,000 jobs, the government said after Costello met with Deputy Prime Minister Sok An.

Significant investment, plenty of jobs plus the promise of improved agricultural methods? Such a deal should be good for Cambodia on all three counts.

But human rights workers said they worry the country's ongoing problems with corruption and poor governance combined with often-violent land evictions mean it is less certain that ordinary people would benefit.

And as veteran opposition legislator Son Chhay made clear, transparency in investment deals is hardly the order of the day.

Son Chhay has plenty of experience in how the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) operates when it comes to investments. He headed parliament's foreign affairs committee until 2008 but said his deputy, a member of the CPP, regularly prevented him from getting information on deals.

"It's still the case that we are not able to get our hands [on investment documents], and that's a cause for great concern," he said.

In the past two decades, much of rural Cambodia has been carved up into economic land concessions (ELCs). The UN's human rights office released a report three years ago that said 59 large concessions totalling almost 950,000 hectares had been granted to private companies to develop agricultural-industrial plantations.

The report made it clear that the true figure was certainly higher because data on smaller ELCs were not available. What was clear, it concluded, was that the concessions had "adversely affected the human rights and livelihoods of Cambodia's rural communities."

In the intervening three years, government figures showed it has approved 33 more agricultural-industrial projects worth 837 million dollars although they did not indicate how much land is involved. State-to-state deals, however, are not on that list, and Qatar, Kuwait and South Korea have so far expressed interest in, or signed deals for, ELCs.

Human rights workers said risks to the rural poor over such deals are significant because they are regularly evicted to make way for foreign investors. The government's often-brutal approach to evictions and its disregard for its own laws in doing so have raised concerns abroad.

Such government behaviour was one of the items discussed by the UN's special rapporteur on human rights during a recent two-week visit. Surya Subedi asked the government to suspend all land evictions until proper legal safeguards are in place.

The government denied the request, citing the need to develop the country. It told Subedi that national guidelines on evictions were being drafted but did not say when they would appear.

The UN envoy expressed cautious optimism in telling reporters that the UN Human Rights Council has adopted a resolution that requires guidelines be put in place to protect the vulnerable.

"So it is now becoming an international requirement," Subedi said.

One relevant regulation recently approved by Cambodia's parliament was a much-criticized expropriation law. Subedi criticized parts of the law for being far too vague.

"For example, what do we mean by public interest?" he asked. "If land can be acquired in the public interest, how do you define it? Who defines it?"

Acceptable compensation measures for those affected were absent, too, he said.

Those concerns are shared by many in Cambodia, including Son Chhay although he did welcome one of the benefits touted by Costello: new ways of farming to boost production.

The opposition lawmaker said new methods could help 80 per cent of the 14 million people who rely on outdated farming techniques. The country's rice yield of around 3 tons per hectare, for example, is far below that of some of its neighbours.

But the primary motive for Costello's investors is financial. Investors want a return on their money, and the food crisis of 2008 when prices rocketed showed that food can be profitable.

"I think agriculture is going to come back into its own as an investment in the decades that lie ahead, and of course, that's a great opportunity for Cambodia," Costello told the Phnom Penh Post.

For his part, Son Chhay would prefer investment from countries like Australia rather than from Cambodia's more traditional investors, such as China and Vietnam, whose companies, he said, are uninterested in improving local skills.

Yet he insisted that a transparent, corruption-free approach is vital to ensure the Cambodian people benefit from the deal.

"A lot of concessions have caused problems to our farmers and indigenous people who have no knowledge of what is in the contracts," he said.

But he called on Costello to make public the full details of any contract with the government.

"He should act upon his word [to do so]," Son Chhay said. "We would hope that this kind of investment from a society like Australia would be done in a proper manner."

Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply

• States and companies target developing nations
• Small farmers at risk from industrial-scale deals

Saturday November 22 2008
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian (UK)

Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.

"These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.

Madagascar's government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge in food prices late last year.

"In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented," Atkin said. "We're used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much."

At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.

According to diplomats, the Saudi Binladin Group is planning an investment in Indonesia to grow basmati rice, while tens of thousands of hectares in Pakistan have been sold to Abu Dhabi investors.

Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have also bought direct stakes in Sudanese agriculture. The president of the UEA, Khalifa bin Zayed, has said his country was considering large-scale agricultural projects in Kazakhstan to ensure a stable food supply.

Even China, which has plenty of land but is now getting short of water as it pursues breakneck industrialisation, has begun to explore land deals in south-east Asia. Laos, meanwhile, has signed away between 2m-3m hectares, or 15% of its viable farmland. Libya has secured 250,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland, and Egypt is believed to want similar access. Kuwait and Qatar have been chasing deals for prime tracts of Cambodia rice fields.

Eager buyers generally have been welcomed by sellers in developing world governments desperate for capital in a recession. Madagascar's land reform minister said revenue would go to infrastructure and development in flood-prone areas.

Sudan is trying to attract investors for almost 900,000 hectares of its land, and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has been courting would-be Saudi investors.

"If this was a negotiation between equals, it could be a good thing. It could bring investment, stable prices and predictability to the market," said Duncan Green, Oxfam's head of research. "But the problem is, [in] this scramble for soil I don't see any place for the small farmers."

Alex Evans, at the Centre on International Cooperation, at New York University, said: "The small farmers are losing out already. People without solid title are likely to be turfed off the land."

Details of land deals have been kept secret so it is unknown whether they have built-in safeguards for local populations.

Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute, said: "There are very few economies of scale in most agriculture above the level of family farm because managing [the] labour is extremely difficult." Investors might also have to contend with hostility. "If I was a political-risk adviser to [investors] I'd say 'you are taking a very big risk'. Land is an extremely sensitive thing. This could go horribly wrong if you don't learn the lessons of history."