April 9 2007By Amy Kazmin in Koh Kong
The Financial Times
“During the Khmer Rouge time, they said ‘Everything belongs to everyone’, and they provided food for us to eat ... Now they take our land, without paying anything, and they are happy and we are crying.” - Lay Doul, a mother of seven who lost eight hectares to the sugar plantation
From his wooden house on stilts, Kong Song, a Cambodian farmer, points out the tractor kicking up a vast dust cloud on the land where he and his fellow villagers once cultivated watermelons, maize and other lucrative cash crops to supplement their rice harvests.
The watermelons, sold at a nearby beach resort, helped residents of Trapeang Kandol village buy motorbikes and mobile phones and finance wedding feasts – significant economic advances in the impoverished countryside.
But last November Mr Kong Song and 52 families in his village were ordered off their land by Koh Kong Sugar Industry, a politically connected company that claimed it had official permission to absorb the fields into a vast new plantation.
Since then, the incensed farmers, with another 300 dispossessed families from the Sre Ambil district, have battled to reclaim land that has now been surrounded by a deep ditch, cleared with bulldozers and planted with sugar. So far they have been met with brute force. Military police last year fired into a crowd of protesting villagers, injuring several.
“We are so worried,” says Mr Kong Song, who says he is left with just two hectares of paddy fields after the company seized five hectares from him. “I just think about how I can support my family because we depend on the land. We cannot survive with just two hectares.”
The tensions in Sre Ambil are symptomatic of rural anger in an economically resurgent Cambodia as powerful companies take possession of vast tracts of increasingly valuable land with little or no regard for the farmers already cultivating the fields. Licadho, a human rights group, says it received complaints about 115 rural land-grabbing cases in 2006 and that authorities and companies are increasingly responding to protesting villagers with violence.
“This is an issue that goes to the heart of this agrarian society,” warns Joseph Mussomeli, the US ambassador in Phnom Penh. “You ignore it at your risk.”
In the 1970s, the radical Khmer Rouge abolished private property, forcing people to live on collective farms. After their brutal reign, during which about a quarter of the population perished, Cambodia was left with just 6m people and there was little pressure on land. But with the population now up to 13m and the economy growing rapidly, land values are rising sharply, prompting those with clout to snap up as much as they can.
Under Cambodia’s progressive 2001 land law, farmers who have used land for five years peacefully and without dispute have the rights to it, but few poor farmers have undertaken the expensive process of obtaining full title, or are even aware such a process exists.
While the World Bank is now assisting with land titling, it is a slow undertaking. Meanwhile, when villagers confront powerful claimants to their lands, local authorities and courts frequently say they are powerless to intervene.
Hun Sen, the long-time strongman, recognises that growing rural discontent over land is a huge problem for his regime.
“Landlessness and land-grabbing creates serious threat to the social and political stability of Cambodia,” he said in February, vowing to punish any officials involved. But so far, analysts say, his approach has been ad hoc, merely forcing a pair of high-profile officials to relinquish some land.
For all the tough rhetoric, much conflict also stems from state policies ostensibly intended to transform fallow or under-utilised land into productive plantations for export-generating crops such as sugar. Since 1992 57 companies, many with close connections to the ruling party, have been awarded vast “economic land concessions” covering nearly 1m hectares.
In theory, concessions should exclude farmers’ lands or provide “fair, just compensation”. But Henry Hwang, an adviser with the Cambodian Legal Education Centre, says these conditions are rarely met.
Koh Kong Sugar, partly owned by a businessman-senator, was last year granted a concession for 9,700 hectares of land in Sre Ambil, some of which was being farmed by villagers. In Trapeang Kandol the company offered compensation of $50 per hectare, although rights lawyers, who are pursuing the case in the courts, say fair market value would have been $500-$1,000 per hectare. While 23 families accepted the money, another 27 families rejected it.
In nearby Chouk Village, Lay Doul, a mother of seven who lost eight hectares to the sugar plantation, is furious at forces that she says are leaving villagers worse off than they were under the Khmer Rouge. “During the Khmer Rouge time, they said ‘Everything belongs to everyone’, and they provided food for us to eat,” she said. “Now they take our land, without paying anything, and they are happy and we are crying.”
