Rubber Barons:
How Vietnamese Companies and International Financiers [IFC, Deutsche Bank] are Driving a Land Grabbing Crisis in Cambodia and Laos
Global Witness | May 2013
Commentary by Theary C. Seng
The ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) was installed into power by the Vietnamese military on 7 Jan. 1979 when it invaded Cambodia.
Since, inter alia,
the CPP facilitated the K-5 Plan, and has given the Vietnamese military control of
national security-sensitive telecommunications (METFONE, whose parent
company is Viettel, owned by the Vietnamese military), the national
airlines... Now Vietnam's free reign to destroy its satellite state,
Cambodia, wholesale.
And these are only some of the things we know about some 33 years later.
- Theary Seng, Phnom Penh, 13 May 2013
Excerpts from the Global Witness May 2013 Executive Summary:
By the end of 2012, 2.6 million hectares of land in Cambodia had been leased, 1.2 million of this for rubber.
Twenty-two percent of this land has been allocated to just five of
Cambodia's most powerful tycoons -- simply the latest example of how the
country's valuable natural resources have been captured by an elite
growing spectacularly rich while one-third of the population [almost 5 million] lives on less than US$0.61 a day.
The legal limit is 10,000 hectares per company.
2.6 million hectares = 73% of Cambodia's arable land, affecting Cambodians in 12 provinces
