World Bank land giveaway in Cambodia marred by problems
Land was taken from residents and a community forest culled
Written by VOD
Posted 19 December 2022 6:44 GMT

Rows of houses and interweaving roads built as part of the World Bank’s Lased II land redistribution project in Kampong Thom province’s Doung commune on November 29, 2022. (Danielle Keeton-Olsen/VOD) Used with permission.

This article by Keat Soriththeavy and Danielle Keeton-Olsen was originally published on VOD News, an independent news site in Cambodia, and is republished on Global Voices under a content-sharing agreement.

In Kampong Thom province, Cambodia, the government has ended a community forest program, and the remaining trees are being removed to create a World Bank project village. On the other side, farmers had land taken away — and their protests quelled with force — to make way for an earlier version of the project.

Both projects are part of the World Bank’s vision to give land and opportunities to Cambodia’s rural poor. Instead, they have left former residents in disarray without their farms or community forest.

VOD reporters visited two land redistribution sites funded by the World Bank in Kampong Thom province. The communities say they lost land and forest in the process, while recipients said the additional land was welcome but has not notably increased their incomes. In some cases, this is because the ground is too arid to grow crops on or too small to produce much rice, the local staple crop.

The World Bank created its Land Allocation for Social and Economic Development project (Lased) in 2007. The project aims to help poor or landless people receive land to “escape poverty and participate in the development of their villages and communes.”

Project documents show that the World Bank began priming a new plot of land in Kampong Thom’s Doung commune in 2014 for the latest phase of its Lased project.

Years before it was distributed in 2019, there were signs this land was already occupied.

Maryam Salim, country director for the World Bank, did not answer a question via email as to whether she knew of any former occupants on the Doung commune land distributed in 2019 or if she knew of a community forest in the new territory. Instead, she said that the Lased II project had distributed 17,000 hectares to 5,091 families by its end in December 2022, with 3,960 families receiving land titles.
Full article: https://globalvoices.org/2022/12/19/wor ... -problems/