Indepth article and long read from Camboja News:
After Rubber Firm Deal, Bunong Fear Broken Promises, Uncertain Land Tenure
4 November 2022 5:07 PM
Jack Brook
Khuon Narim
Pech Chreada district, Mondulkiri — One year after signing an agreement with subsidiaries of a European rubber conglomerate, Maly Kim lamented that his indigenous Bunong community felt deceived.

The deal was meant to resolve one of Cambodia’s longest-running land disputes, but like other Bunong village representatives who signed agreements with the companies, Kim says his village of Pu Lu has not received most of the benefits they were promised by the firms in exchange for ceding most of their customary land claims.

“The community was happy when we signed the agreement,” Kim recalled in mid-October. “But now we are unhappy. People think the company lied to us.”

Beginning in 2007, Luxembourg-based Socfin Group’s subsidiaries acquired three government-granted economic land concessions encompassing more than 12,000 hectares, which overlapped with ancestral forests and farmland of seven Bunong villages in Mondulkiri province’s Bosra commune.

For more than a decade, some Bunong villagers have been trying to reclaim and gain legal recognition for their customary land, including via multiple rounds of negotiations with Socfin subsidiaries, Varanasi, Sethikula and Coviphama, which concluded in September last year. Some details of the settlement were released this September, in a joint statement issued by the firms and community representatives who negotiated on behalf of 210 families in five villages.

Socfin has touted the negotiations as a success, saying the company helped provide communities with the opportunity to secure land tenure for their culturally significant sacred forests by mapping Bunong land in Bosra for the first time. Four villages — Pu Lu, Pu Raing, Pu Cha and Pu Teut — can now apply for communal land titles, Socfin said in an email.

Without the titles, indigenous communal land could be reallocated by the state or seized by private interests.

But Pu Lu and Pu Cha village chiefs, and the villages’ lawyer during the mediation, say the communities don’t have sufficient support to finish the land titling process, and members who did not participate in negotiations may be excluded.

All seven Bosra villages have been stalled at the final stages of the titling process since 2012, in part due to the Socfin land disputes and an expensive, complicated bureaucracy, which in the last 20 years has awarded communal land titles to less than 40 of Cambodia’s 455 registered indigenous communities, according to NGO Forum’s Sophea Pheap.

In addition, the outcomes of the negotiations, including the creation of communal land maps, remain opaque — even to Bosra village chiefs — due to confidentiality agreements between Socfin and the 24 community representatives who participated in five separate, village-specific negotiations from 2017 to 2021.

Socfin agreed to allow four villages to apply for communal land titles for 511 hectares of land within the more than 12,000 hectares of concessions, according to the September joint statement.

But Socfin subsidiaries still control approximately 7,000 hectares of Bunong ancestral land in Bosra commune, said Kroeung Tola, a resident of Bosra’s Lam Meh village, which did not participate in the negotiations.

Standing on the edge of York Lorn forest spirit forest, spared by Socfin but still lacking a communal title, Pu Cha village representative Brut Tha said he was grateful that his community had at least retained this forest, surrounded by rows and rows of rubber trees.

“I hope we will get just 50% of what the company said they would provide in the agreement,” Tha said. “But we are still not 100% sure.”
Full article: https://cambojanews.com/after-rubber-fi ... nd-tenure/

David and Goliath ?
The French firm "Bollore" also has wide-reaching influence in European media :
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -in-france

Bolloré blacklisted over alleged rights violations on plantations in Africa and Asia
by Victoria Schneider on 29 September 2023
French logistics giant Bolloré SE has been deemed an unethical investment by some of Switzerland’s most powerful pension funds.
Bolloré failed to act to resolve accusations of human rights abuses committed by its subsidiary, Socfin, around oil palm and rubber plantations in West Africa and Southeast Asia, the Swiss Association for Responsible Investments (SVVK-ASIR) determined.
Investigators commissioned by Socfin recently found credible claims of sexual harassment, land disputes and unfair recruitment in Liberia and Cameroon; field visits to other sites will take place later this year.

Some of Switzerland’s largest pension funds have placed French logistics giant Bolloré SE on a blacklist. The Swiss Association for Responsible Investments (SVVK-ASIR) decided its members should no longer invest in Bolloré after it failed to act to resolve accusations of land-grabbing, environmental damage and complicity in human rights violations on oil palm and rubber plantations operated by Socfin, in which it holds a 39% stake.

“Bolloré SE’s subsidiary has been repeatedly accused of violating the rights of local populations in countries such as Cambodia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cameroon,” wrote Christina Meier, an associate at SVVK-ASIR, in an emailed response to Mongabay. “Bolloré SE shares responsibility for ensuring that human rights are observed and protected by the subsidiary due to its considerable influence.”

SVVK-ASIR is a group founded by some of Switzerland’s most powerful pension and social security funds, which together manage $329 billion in assets. The association regularly assesses the ethical conduct of companies its members have invested in with reference to standards set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the U.N.

There are currently 30 corporations on the association’s exclusion list Bolloré is the first French company to be placed on this list, which is part of a voluntary guideline to ethical investment to which SVVK-ASIR’s members agree.

SVVK-ASIR blacklists companies only after an extended process. When a company is found to be involved in demonstrable, severe and systematic violations, the association initiates a dialogue to give the accused company an opportunity to improve its conduct. This process can take three to four years, after which a company will receive a final call for dialogue before it is blacklisted.

“The exclusion recommendation from Bolloré SE was the result of an unsuccessful engagement dialogue that lasted several years,” wrote Meier, explaining that the company did not respond adequately or constructively to SVVK-ASIR and its partners’ questions. “There was no substantial contribution to meet the goals of the engagement.”

Repeated attempts by affected communities to address grievances directly with Socfin have failed to produce results.

Neth Prak, a spokesperson for Cambodia’s Bunong Indigenous People Association (BIPA), told Mongabay that his association has been trying to resolve land disputes with Socfin since 2008. “The problem is that Socfin has not been willing to sit down with us and find a solution together,” he said. “Instead of entering a dialogue, the company brought in their own mechanism and tried to use its power to make things look as if they were solved.”
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/09/bollo ... -and-asia/

Bolloré is also good for buying medias and firing funny people from them, so they can't make fun of him between others, much to the disapointment of the audience.

C' est un connard (he' s a dick).