The mismanagement of large swaths of Cambodia’s land by the country’s elites under the policy of economic land concessions has displaced thousands of rural families and accounted for 40% of total deforestation.
With even the government seeming to acknowledge the ineffectiveness of ELCs as an economic driver, calls are growing to return the land to dispossessed communities or repurpose them in other ways.
One expert says the role of local communities will be central to the success of any reformation of the ELC system and will need to be carefully considered to avoid the pitfalls of the old system.
Another proposes giving land currently owned by nonperforming ELCs to agricultural cooperatives managed by communities, placing more negotiating power in the hands of farmers rather than concessionaires.
PHNOM PENH — “Make the bosses rich in Cambodia,” then-prime minister Hun Sen said at the 2012 inauguration of a sugar refinery in Kampong Speu province. “If a country has no millionaires, where can the poor get their money from?”
This underscored the ideology at the heart of the policy of economic land concessions, or ELCs, which promised benefits for all by handing vast swaths of the country to a handful of elites to develop, mostly for agroindustry.
The sugar refinery where Hun Sen gave this speech belonged to one his closest advisers, Ly Yong Phat — a ruling party senator with a sprawling business empire and a well-documented history of environmental vandalism.
The senator’s sugar refineries and the ELCs he was granted for the development of plantations now sit dormant and fallow. The irreplaceable ecosystems that once occupied Ly Yong Phat’s ELCs are long gone.
So are the thousands of families who were evicted to make way for the plantations. While many of the evictees temporarily found day-laborer work on the plantations, there was no compensation for the family farms that were lost. Then, when Cambodia’s sugar business became embroiled in the so-called Blood Sugar scandal — an advocacy campaign that targeted European buyers and Australian financiers of Cambodian sugar due to rights abuses linked to tycoons like Ly Yong Phat — the refineries unceremoniously fell silent, leaving former residents with no land and no work.
Long read: https://news.mongabay.com/2023/11/calls ... on-policy/
The failed ELC policy....
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