Land Grab: Foreign Companies Drive Cambodians from Farms

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/foreign-companies-are-taking-farmlands-away-from-cambodians-a-935801.html

Each year, foreign agricultural corporations deprive thousands of Cambodian farmers of their fields -- with the government's help. Human rights groups claim German taxpayer money is used to fund a program that benefits land grabbers.

Land Grab: Foreign Companies Drive Cambodians from Farms
By Andreas Lorenz
November 27, 2013 – 01:12 PM

Everyone in the Cambodian village of Chouk remembers what happened on the morning of May 19, 2006, when bulldozers appeared on National Route 48, which cuts through the town. Men from a Thai company, Khon Kaen Sugar Industry PCL, presented the Cambodian villagers with documents and said: "This land now belongs to us."

Dozens of farmers tried to stop the bulldozers when they began leveling their rice fields. The police arrived at the scene, shots were fired and a female protester was injured. A barbed-wire fence now surrounds the fields, which have since become a sugarcane plantation. Farmer Teng Kao, 53, winds his way through fences, jumps across ditches and finally points to a spot in the distance. "Back there," he says. "That was where my fields were."

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Many Cambodians have suffered the same fate as the villagers from Chouk. Companies and privileged elites, often members of the ruling Cambodian Peoples' Party under Prime Minister Hun Sen, are taking possession of fields and forested areas.

The companies, often foreign, receive "economic land concessions" from the government when they need land for plantations and factories. Cambodian non-governmental organizations estimate that about 400,000 people have been driven out in this fashion since 2003.