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In Cambodia today, the government is leasing vast quantities of land to private investors to develop large-scale agro-industrial plantations. The leased land often overlaps with the private land of small- scale food producers and the common lands and natural resources that sustain rural communities. Forcibly deprived of their productive base by local and foreign investors backed by state security forces, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who had pulled themselves out of poverty are once again struggling to survive.

Illegal land grabbing by powerful actors is unexceptional in Cambodia, where forced evictions and confiscation of land rank among the country’s most pervasive human rights problems. Since 1990 approximately eleven percent of the population of Phnom Penh has been forcibly evicted and relocated to peri-urban resettlement sites that often lack housing, basic infrastructure, and access to public services and and granted as “economic land concessions” to Cambodian and foreign investors without regard for the rights of affected rural and indigenous communities. As a result, these communities have suffered widespread displacement, dispossession of their farming and grazing lands, and reduced access to the forests that sustain their livelihoods.

This guide is made for Cambodian communities who are affected by ELCs (Economic Land Concessions), or are likely to be affected in the future. It is divided into three parts: ELCs and Communities, ELCs and the Law, and Taking Action. Part One covers the basics of what industrial agriculture and ELCs are, the potential benefits and risks, and the process of Environmental Impact Assessment and public participation. In the Part 2 we discuss the main laws that apply to ELCs in Cambodia, and in Part 3 we look at what communities can do if they are affected by an ELC project.

Cambodia and Laos are in the grip of a land grabbing crisis, driven by Vietnamese ‘rubber barons’. This report reveals how two of Vietnam’s largest companies, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) and the Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG), have leased vast tracts of land for plantations in Laos and Cambodia, with disastrous consequences for local communities and the environment. Close ties to corrupt political and business elites provide them with impunity, deals are cloaked in secrecy and they are bankrolled by international finance such as Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).