More abuses await Cambodian workers sent to Qatar?

Cambodia approves law on sending workers to Qatar

Tuesday 21/8/2012
Gulf Times (Doha, Qatar)

“Cambodian law is good but often falls short in implementation”

Cambodian workers are expected to arrive in Qatar soon as the southeast Asian country’s national assembly has approved a draft law to send workers to the Gulf state.

According to The Phnom Penh Post, the house approved the draft law recently after the two countries signed an agreement to recruit Cambodian workers in May.

But the Post said a rights organisation and opposition party leaders have raised some doubts about the proposed plan to send workers to Qatar, demanding overseas Cambodians adequate protection and preparation.

Under the draft law, the ministry of labour will train workers and regulate the process of sending them overseas, the Post quoted Labour Minister Vong Sauth as saying.

Cambodia: If you don't want to buy it, rent it! For info, call Dr. Hun Xen

The Rent-A-Country

Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009
By Krista Mahr
Time Magazine (USA)

"When farmers in food-insecure countries like Laos and Cambodia are scrambling to feed their children, does it make sense to lease out vast tracts to grow rice for foreign governments?"

Take a moment to consider breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Maybe you grabbed a banana or ate a bowl of granola. Whatever it was, chances are that some — if not all — of your morning meal came from a country you don't live in.

Food isolationism is dead. It collapsed in a messy, public heap last year when oil hit $100-plus per bbl. and the world's crush on biofuels pushed food prices to unprecedented highs. Thirty-six nations needed food aid. Twenty-five imposed export bans or restrictions to keep staple crops like rice and wheat at home. As prices shot up 50%, food riots erupted in Haiti, killing at least five, and eventually brought down the government. (Read about Russia's "recession diet".)

And then something else happened. A few diplomats and business leaders quietly boarded their jets and got to work. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and South Korea — well-off states without enough good land or water to feed their people — started to look outside their borders. "It's economically not viable to grow food in the desert," says David Hallam, deputy director of trade and markets for the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization. "They said, 'If we can't grow our own food, we'll grow it somewhere else.'"

Their words did not fall on deaf ears. In April, diplomatic relations between Cambodia and Qatar were officially established. In May, the Presidents of South Korea and Sudan discussed food cooperation at the launch of the Korea-Arab Society in Seoul. The Saudi Binladin Group penned nonbinding agreements with Indonesia to plant rice on some 1.5 million acres (607,000 hectares) of island paradise, and millions more have reportedly been earmarked, from Pakistan and Kazakhstan to Burma and the Philippines. Alwi Shihab, a special economic adviser on the Middle East to the President of Indonesia, sees this new investment as a boon to the nation's agricultural sector. "We have large, sizable, fertile -land and good water," says Shihab.

Growing crops for strangers, of course, is nothing new. The long, grim march of colonialism was driven by Europe's penchant for sugar, tea, tobacco and other crops that don't flourish in northern climes. But as climate change and growing populations put ever more pressure on the earth, state-backed searches for land and food contracts as part of a national food-security strategy strike many as fundamentally new. "We're talking about a whole different logic," says Renée Vellvé, a researcher for Grain, an organization that has been compiling media reports of these deals. Vellvé's group sees a downside. When farmers in food-insecure countries like Laos and Cambodia are scrambling to feed their children, does it make sense to lease out vast tracts to grow rice for foreign governments? "These are not fallow fields," says Paul Risley, a World Food Program spokesman based in Thailand. "These are villages where families have farmed for centuries."

And for investors, moving into regions where so many depend so fiercely on the land can translate into risk. "You see a backlash," says Rajesh Behal, a principal investment officer for International Finance Corp., which has just put $75 million into an emerging-market agribusiness fund. "People say, 'Who are these people, and how long will they be there?'" In July, South Korea's Daewoo Logistics signed contracts to lease more than 2.2 million acres (900,000 hectares) in Madagascar — more than a third of the island nation's arable land — to grow corn and oil palms. A violent political dispute erupted in the capital soon after, complicating the deal. "Farming is a pretty dirty business," says Behal. "You have to know the nuances and withstand the volatility."

But in countries where governments can't afford — or don't prioritize — significant domestic agricultural investment, foreign money has the power to deliver better roads, irrigation, technology and training. "One thousand times we say yes on private and public agricultural investment, but done in a certain way," says Jean-Philippe Audinet, acting director of the policy division at the U.N.'s International Fund for Agricultural Development. "It's very important not to look negatively at this trend. We have to try to look at the win-win."

After all, is there a choice? Some of these deals are probably doomed to fall under the ax of the global credit crunch, if they haven't already. But for land-poor countries, the underlying problem of relying heavily on imports will remain. Encouraging a new generation of deals to come out of the diplomatic closet may be the best chance we have to make sure that people on both ends of the bargain end up with food on their plate.

—With reporting by Jennifer Veale in Seoul

Cambodia farm land sold to wealthy nations

29 Jan 2009
By Nick Paton Walsh
Channel 4 News (UK)

Countries who are unable to produce enough food for themselves are scouring the world for cheap farmland to grow food and export it home, reports Nick Paton Walsh.

Never mind the food miles: when prices are soaring around the world some countries have found a way of keeping their own consumers happy - farming out their farms overseas.

China, South Korea and many Arab nations can't produce enough food for themselves, but they do have cash and plenty of it.

Now they are scouring the world for cheap farmland to grow their own food and export it home. It's a global trend which has already got the United Nations worried.

Huge plots of land in Africa have been secured and now many rich nations are looking elsewhere for farmland.

One of Asia's poorest countries, Cambodia, is at the top of their wish list.

Cambodia: Oil-rich Kuwait in August granted a 546-million-dollar loan in return for crop production

Global trends driving 'land grab' in poor nations: activists

Sunday, January 04, 2009

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) — Resource-hungry nations are snapping up huge tracts of agricultural land in poor Asian nations, in what activists say is a "land grab" that will worsen poverty and malnutrition.

Global trends including high prices for oil and commodities, the biofuels boom, and now the sweeping downturn, are spurring import-reliant countries to take action to protect their sources of food.

China and South Korea, which are both short on arable land, and Middle Eastern nations flush with petrodollars, are driving the trend to sign up rights to swathes of territory in Asia and Africa.

"Today's food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab," the Spain-based agricultural rights group Grain said in a recent report.

It said that some deals were targeted at boosting food security by producing crops that would be sent back home for consumption, while others were to establish money-making plantations like palm oil and rubber.

"As a result of both trends, fertile agricultural land is being swiftly privatised and consolidated by foreign companies in some ofthe world's poorest and hungriest countries," it said.

In one of the biggest deals, South Korea's Daewoo Logistics said in November it would invest about 6.0 billion dollars to develop 3.2 million acres (1.3 million hectares) in Madagascar -- almost half the size of Belgium.

Daewoo plans to produce four million tonnes of corn and 500,000 tonnes of palm oil a year, most of which will be shipped out of impoverished Madagascar -- where the World Food Programme still provides food relief.

"We will build everything from ports and railways to markets on a barren and untouched area," said Shin Dong-Hyun, general manager of the WFP's financing and strategic planning department.

Although commodity prices have fallen from their highs earlier this year, resource-poor and heavily populated countries are still concerned about securing long-term supplies.

Walden Bello, from Bangkok-based advocacy group Focus on the Global South, said the looming global recession is not likely to halt the trend which he fears will worsen the lot of landless peasants.

"In a situation where global agricultural production has become so volatile and unpredictable, I would not be surprised if the Middle Eastern countries that are engaged in this would continue to push on," he told AFP.

Bello said that many of the deals were struck in dysfunctional and corruption-ridden nations, and rejected claims the land being signed away is of poor quality, and that the projects will bring jobs and improve infrastructure.

"What we're talking about is private parties using state contracts to enrich themselves," he said. "It's an intersection of corrupt governments and land-hungry nations."

In Cambodia, where the WFP also supplies aid, oil-rich Kuwait in August granted a 546-million-dollar loan in return for crop production.

Undersecretary of State Suos Yara said Cambodia was also in talks with Qatar, South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia over agricultural investments including land concessions.

"If we do this work successfully, we can get at least 3.0 billion dollars from these agricultural investments," he said.

"With the (global financial) crisis, this is a chance for Cambodia to look to the future by pushing agriculture in order to attract foreign investments."

But opposition lawmaker Son Chhay said he was suspicious about why a wealthy nation like Kuwait needed to lease land to grow rice rather then just import the grain.

"Cambodian farmers need the land," he said, urging the government to limit the area under lease and ensure Cambodia was not plundered by foreign nations.

In the Philippines, another land lease hotspot, a series of high-profile deals has clashed with long-running demands for agrarian reform including land redistribution.

"It will aggravate the problem of landlessness, the insufficiency of land for Filipino peasants," said Congressman Rafael Mariano, who also heads the Peasants' Movement of the Philippines (KMP).

However the Philippine government is undeterred and during President Gloria Arroyo's visit to Qatar in December, officials opened talks over the lease of at least 100,000 hectares of agricultural land to the emirate.

Bello said he expected these sorts of deals to increase, forcing peasants from rural areas and into cities where together with the global downturn they will add to the ranks of the unemployed.

"It's particularly explosive in those countries where you have a high degree of landlessness, like the Philippines where seven out of 10 rural people do not have access to land," he said.

In the impoverished and corrupt dictatorship of Laos, some experts estimate that between two million and three million hectares have been parcelled off in a rampant and uncontrolled process that has now been suspended by the government.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has sounded alarm over the loss of land in a country where in rural areas, every second child is malnourished and access to land for foraging of natural resources is critical.

"If the environment is changed, with the trees cut and replaced with industrial crops," said FAO representative in Laos, Serge Verniau, "they can face serious danger".

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."

Cambodia for sale by Hun Sen: Price tag $3 bln

Cambodia holds land deal talks

November 20 2008
By Raphael Minder in Hong Kong
Financial Times (Hong Kong)

Cambodia is in talks with several Asian and Middle Eastern governments to receive as much as $3bn in agricultural investment in return for millions of hectares in land concessions, according to a senior government official.

Some of the deals would be finalised “in coming months”, said Suos Yara, under-secretary of state responsible for economic co-operation.

The revelation comes as impoverished countries rich in fertile land and water such as Cambodia, but also nations in east Africa, seek agriculture investments from resource-poor but capital-rich countries.

Kuwait and Qatar were “very strongly interested” in securing more farming land, he said, with South Korea and the Philippines, which suffered from rice shortages this year, among potential Asian investors.

“Food prices have recently fallen but that really makes little difference because the food supply issue will be there for the long term,” he said. “With this financial crisis, we need to seize this opportunity to develop our farming and switch [foreign] investment from construction to agriculture.”

Kuwait has already agreed to give Cambodia loans totalling $546m (€436m, £369m) to develop agriculture, the second largest aid pledge ever received by Cambodia, after aid and loans totalling $601m offered by China last year.

This week, Daewoo Logistics of South Korea secured a landmark deal with Madagascar to grow food crops to send back to Seoul on a 99-year lease. Daewoo hopes to farm its Madagascar lease for free but is promising local jobs and infrastructure investments in road and irrigation.

Suos Yara would not detail the terms of the potential deals but said leases would run between 70 and 90 years. He did not say how much investors will pay for the leases, with the $3bn more likely in infrastructure investments than rent.

Phnom Penh calculates that Cambodia has 6m hectares available for farming, of which 2.5m are under cultivation. By comparison, the Korean deal with Madagascar covers 1.3m hectares.

Apart from boosting farming acreage, Suos Yara said the deals would make an equally significant contribution in terms of infrastructure and technology upgrades in a country that has emerged from decades of war and a 1970s genocide.

Last year, Cambodia produced 2.5m tonnes of rice, of which about 1.3m was exported, from a sector that relies on a single annual harvest and family-run farms. “With better technology and irrigation, rice production could double in some areas,” he said.

Cambodia’s farming push comes as the government faces an abrupt economic slowdown after averaging growth of 9 per cent over the past decade, as Korean property developers and other cash-strapped foreign investors start to shelve real estate projects.

Cambodia attracted about $3bn of foreign direct investment in 2007, of which 45 per cent was in real estate projects and 25 per cent in agriculture. Suos Yara said the land deals would help maintain foreign investment at such levels but with about half of the total coming from farming investments.

The country has suffered a food crisis, with the Asian Development Bank providing $35m in emergency food assistance last month. However, Suos Yara said conditions had returned to normal. “It was a distribution problem and not a food shortage problem,” he said.

While most of the potential investors were seeking to bolster their food reserves, Phnom Penh had also been talking to biofuel producers, including Indonesia, about ceding land for crops such as jatropha, a succulent plant becoming increasingly popular in the production of biofuels.

Hun Sen plans to visit Doha, Qatar

Cambodian PM plans Doha visit

Wednesday, 24 September, 2008
By Arvind Nair
Gulf Times

CAMBODIAN Prime Minister Hun Sen is expected to pay a state visit to Qatar next January as part of efforts to strengthen bilateral relations, reports said.

Hun Sen is also scheduled to stop by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The visit is part of a new government strategy that aims to make Cambodia a target destination for more Middle Eastern travellers.

The move comes amid efforts by Hun Sen to strengthen ties between Cambodia and the Gulf nations.

Cambodia last month signed a direct-flight agreement with Qatar. Cambodia’s Minister of Tourism Thong Khon was quoted as saying that a similar agreement with Kuwait was expected soon.

In April, Qatari Prime Minister HE Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani announced a $200mn investment in Cambodia’s agriculture sector, while Kuwait last month pledged $546mn in soft loans to upgrade irrigation systems and roads throughout the country.

Cambodia has more than 300,000 ethnic Muslim Cham residents. Cham communities are currently marketed to Muslim tourists, Cambodia Association of Travel Agents has said.

“Cambodia has a Muslim Centre and other sites of interest, and several restaurants serve halal food,” the sources said.

Kuwaitis to return to Cambodia for rice talks

Aug 6, 2008
DPA

Phnom Penh - Cambodia's overtures to corner the rice export market in the Gulf had been reciprocated by Kuwait, Agriculture Minister Chan Sarun said Wednesday as a Kuwaiti delegation was scheduled to return this month for further negotiations.

'A Kuwaiti delegation will arrive back here on August 20 to continue the talks begun during the Kuwaiti prime minister's visit,' Chan Sarun said by telephone but declined to give further details.

Cambodia has been exporting low-grade rice to African countries, such as Guinea, but is muscling its way toward being a major regional rice exporter.

Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Saba ended a three-day visit to Cambodia Tuesday, during which he discussed swapping his country's technical assistance for arable land for cultivation of quality rice for Kuwait.

Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday that he would visit the Gulf states of Kuwait and Qatar in January to discuss rice exports in a bid to clinch Gulf markets.

'Those countries have oil but no rice,' Hun Sen said in a speech carried on state radio during a rice-planting ceremony about 40 kilometres south-west of Phnom Penh. 'I think the Gulf can become our rice market.'

Cambodia welcomed cash, not credit, Hun Sen said.

'We are a poor country, so when countries buy our rice they should pay, not owe money,' the premier said.

That should not be a problem for oil-rich Qatar and Kuwait, both of whose prime ministers have visited Cambodia this year.

By 2015, the Cambodian government said, it hopes to export 10 million tons of the staple per year.

Qatar extends educational aid program into Cambodia

ROTA extends educational aid program into Cambodia

AME Info (Middle East)

A delegation of five senior Cambodian officials has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Reach Out To Asia (ROTA) in Doha, marking the initiation of ROTA's newest project; the expansion of Vihear Suork High School and Primary School and the establishment of a Vocational Center at Vihear Suor Commune, Khsach Kandal District near Phnom Penh, in The Kingdom of Cambodia.

The Kingdom of Cambodia, which is one of ROTA's priority countries, suffers from a high drop-out rate in schools and there is an issue with both the affordability and quality of primary and secondary education. Enrollment levels in primary and secondary schools are significantly lower by poor families, girls and ethnic minorities.

Following a field assessment to identify suitable projects, ROTA elected to sponsor three facilities in the Kandal Province, enabling them to offer higher quality educational opportunities to a greater number of students.

The schools are situated in a rural area, where 45% of the population lives in poverty. The long-term objective of this project is to ensure that high-quality educational and vocational training are made accessible to all students, thereby producing highly skilled workers and improving the economy and overall society.

Primary education opportunities will be provided through the provision of a 3-storey building with 24 classrooms, furnished and equipped with all necessary materials and a playground. Secondary school facilities will also occupy a 3-storey building with a further 21 fully equipped classrooms. The vocational training center will house 21 workshop classrooms. Teacher and student dormitory facilities, a cafeteria, stadium, football and basketball courts will also be constructed as part of the project.

The signing was attended by representatives of the Royal Government of Cambodia and Monithapana Foundation, the NGO supervising the project locally: H.E. Dr. Aun Porn Moniroth, Managing Director General, H.E. Vongsey Vissoth, Deputy Managing Director General, H.E. Chou Vichet, Deputy Managing Director General, H.E. Kim Sopheak, Financial Director, and Mr. Chuan Samreth, Deputy Program Director.

The Vice President (Administration) of Qatar Foundation, and ROTA board member, Mr Rashid Al Naimi attended the meeting, along with Director of Reach Out To Asia, Mrs Omnia Nour, Business Development Manager Mr Armend Reka, Program Coordinator Miss Lamis Sabra, Head of Communications & Marketing Mrs Jill McCarthy, and Volunteer Program Manager Mr David Burton.

According to H.E. Dr. Aun Porn Moniroth Chairman of the Supreame National Economic Council and Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, this project will affect more than 2,700 direct beneficiaries each year. FurthermqAore, around 520,000 of the population from Kampong Cham and Prey Vengprovinces will also be able to benefit from this project.

'We all at ROTA, and in particular HE Sheikha Mayassa Bint Hamad Al Thani, our Chairperson, are looking forward to a fruitful period of interaction, which will commence with the construction and preparation of the Vihear Suork school complex,' said Omnia Nour. 'I truly believe that the programs and experiences of The Monithapana Foundation and Reach Out To Asia, will complement each other superbly.'

During their trip, the delegation gave a brief presentation to the ROTA team about the existing facilities and status of the education system in the area in which the project will take place.