Environment and land

At least 600 families in the remote Svay Chek district of Banteay Meanchey province are being threatened by a shortage of drinking water that began earlier this month, a provincial official said on 16 February. The water in the wells and rivers has been drying up ...

The Ministry of Mines and Energy plans to release the environmental impact assessments of two controversial sand-dredging companies in Koh Kong “soon”, ministry spokesman Meng Saktheara said on 15 February. Activists from NGO Mother Nature – three of whom have been arrested for interfering with the ...

Myanmar is to develop a corps of rice experts, specialists who will be tasked with making the most of what may be the country’s single most important product. Yezin Agricultural University, the only university producing agriculturalists, is preparing to expand its courses by introducing a specialisation ...

Seventy per cent of enterprises with high energy needs and emissions and 50 per cent of industrial production establishments will apply clean and energy-saving technologies by 2020. This is the agenda of a newly approved national action programme on sustainable production and consumption for the period ...

Australian banking giant ANZ has come under fire for its response to a scandal over its financing of a sugar plantation previously linked to forced evictions and child labour in Kampong Speu province. Titled Still Banking on Land Grabs, Oxfam’s Australia branch released a report on ...

The National Food Institute of Thailand’s Ministry of Industry says small and medium-sized food processing businesses should target Myanmar given the jump in Thai food imports. The institute revealed that Thai food exports to Myanmar increased 24 per cent last year. That makes Myanmar the world’s fourth largest importer ...

Government officials, economists and businesses discussed the implementation of a draft program to invigorate vegetable farming in Cambodia and cut imports from neighbouring countries in half by 2018. The workshop, organised by the Center for Policy Studies and Agriculture Ministry last week, revolved around the Cambodian ...

A group of foreign conservation volunteers sailing off the coast of Kep province late on 12 February were set upon by a flotilla of illegal fishermen who attempted to pelt them with rocks and other projectiles, only disbanding after Cambodian maritime police fired warning shots into ...

The Mekong watershed nurtures extraordinary biodiversity, with new species of plants and animals discovered every year. It has also nurtured humans. Tens of millions of people—much of the population of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam—depend on the Mekong. Planners think the Mekong has a gift to give: hydropower. ...

Myanmar farmers are protesting against a plan they say will reduce their water supply. They say water is so short they have already been forced to abandon growing paddy and switch to beans and pulses. They demand that work to open up land around a nearby ...