Environment and land
Seizure of large quantities of illegal timber continues
With a crackdown announced on the illegal timber trade—and a proposed nationwide logging ban by the end of the fiscal year in March 2017—seizures of illegally cut logs have exceeded 10,000 tons in the first quarter from April to June. Myo Min, director of the Forestry ...
Prey Lang still logged: community
Continued widespread logging in the Prey Lang forest is evidence that the government’s recent push to have more than 400,000 hectares of land protected is toothless, according to activists as well as a Prey Lang Community Network report released on 29 June. The report’s purpose was ...
Prohibited rosewood seized en route to China
Police in Oudomxay province last week seized some 47 rosewood timbers and 25 partially-processed rosewoods weighing 2,534 kilogrammes in total loaded inside the container-like truck, which carried a Vientiane number plate reportedly being transported from Vientiane en route to China, a provincial police official said on ...
NGO releases ELC figures to help with ‘shortcomings’
The NGO Forum on 28 June released an extensive and updated accounting of economic land concessions in Cambodia, suggesting that in a 20-year period, 267 ELCs totalling 1,532,783 hectares were granted. The data collection, from 1995 to the end of 2015, was conducted by the Research Advocacy ...
Officials bid to increase South Korean investment
A delegation of Cambodian investment officials and prominent private sector businessmen held a seminar in Seoul, South Korea, on 29 June in an effort to drum up more Korean investment in Cambodia’s growing agro-industrial sector. The Cambodian delegates briefed more than 80 Korean investors in attendance on ...
New restrictions aim to curb rice imports
Cambodia’s Ministry of Economy and Finance announced on 27 June that the government will block all illegal rice imports at its borders and limit legal rice shipments from Vietnam based on production cost. As part of the new regime, only milled rice with a production cost of ...
Most ELC disputes still unresolved
More than two-thirds of the 158 land disputes triggered by large-scale plantations over the past two decades have yet to be fully resolved, according to a new report by the NGO Forum on Cambodia. Drawing largely on incomplete government records, the umbrella group’s Statistical Analysis of ...
Proposed Taiwan megaproject in Ha Tinh needs PM approval
Taiwanese firm Wei Yu Engineering’s US$2.5-billion investment proposal in Ha Tinh Province must be approved by the Prime Minister, not the provincial government, said an official. Tran Tu Anh, director of Ha Tinh Department of Planning and Investment, told Dan Tri news website last week that ...
China’s last wild river carries conflicting environmental hopes
Three great rivers rush through parallel canyons in the mountains of southwest China on their way to the coastal plains of Asia. At least 10 dams have been built on two of them, the Mekong and the Yangtze. The third remains wild: the remote, raging ...
Follow the money
A surge in U.S. aid is helping Cambodia scale up work to rid its eastern provinces of the deadly detritus of old wars. With other countries pulling funding, deminers are leaving the west—where death and injury from old landmines and artillery shells are far more ...
