Friday, November 10, 2017

Cambodian Land Grab

About 40,000 hectares, home to 25 villages and nearly 25,000 people, were leased to Chinese sugar companies in 2011, leaving many with nothing. Few villagers had titles to their land, with boundaries agreed by mutual consent. Now, the women spend their days campaigning for the return of their land, while the men look for new ways to earn a living.

"We have lived off the land for so many years. Yet they took our land, our forest - with no consultation, and little compensation," said Tep Them, 52,  in northern Cambodia's Preah Vihear province where Tep Them's family has grown rice, reared cattle and collected resin from the forest to eke out a living and set aside a little extra. Them lost land that her ancestors had cultivated when the government decided in 2011 to develop it under its Economic Land Concession (ELC) policy.

"The land is our livelihood, our life; how can the government give it away? We want the concession to be cancelled and the land returned to us," she said. Them and other villagers have tried to halt the onslaught of the sugar companies, sleeping in their fields, blocking the path of bulldozers, confiscating machinery, and planting rice in small patches that they sought to reclaim. The country began issuing ELCs in 1995, leasing government land to private firms for agriculture and agriculture-based industries to spur economic growth and alleviate poverty.

By 2012, ELCs accounted for more than 2.1 million hectares of land, covering more than a tenth of Cambodia's surface area. While ELCs were meant for state-owned land with no public purpose, they often included land from small farmers and indigenous groups, leaving locals without home or livelihood. Such land deals have displaced more than 770,000 people since 2000, human rights lawyers say.

Chinese firms have by far the most land under ELCs, with about 400,000 hectares in sugar, rubber and palm oil plantations

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