Bitter sweet: how small Cambodian farmers are paying the price for the West’s sugar policies

Sitting close to the fireplace beside her makeshift wooden stilt house, 39-year-old Louv Veoun is busy cooking a piece of royal jelly taken from a beehive in a nearby wood, the only food she was able to scavenge today. “Until four years ago I was living a nice life,” she moans, stirring the yellow mush and mixing it with a few handfuls of rice. “Now, I have to work like a slave in the sugar plantation in order to survive.”

A mother of eight with a resolute attitude and incredibly sorrowful eyes, Louv was until a few years ago just another small farmer in Kork, a rural village in Kampong Speu province, 75 kilometres west of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Louv would wake up early in the morning, prepare a frugal breakfast and go to tend her paddy field, a two-hectare piece of land her ancestors had been farming since time immemorial. Together with her husband, she was cultivating enough rice to sustain her eight children and send them to school.

Then, one day in March 2010, Louv’s existence changed forever: according to her account, a group of workers from a local sugar company arrived in the village, accompanied by policemen and soldiers. Despite the protests and supplications of the local people, they ordered Louv and another 20 families off their land. In only a few hours, before the villagers’ own eyes, bulldozers had cleared all their rice fields to turn them into a sugar cane plantation.

Without any prior notice or consultation, Louv was forced to forfeit her house and land, her only source of living, for a compensation of just US$25 (Dh92). “I was so angry, but I couldn’t do anything,” she recounts, her eyes filled with tears. “The local authorities told us we would better accept the money, because the company would have taken our land anyway.”

Now she lives on a small plot of land belonging to a sympathetic relative who allowed her to build a small house for her family. The wooden structure, with a large hole in the roof, sits just beside the plantation where, in an ironic twist, Louv now works as a daily labourer, harvesting sugar cane for 10 hours a day in order to earn US$2.50. Without their fields and with no possibility of gaining any alternative income, thousands of villagers all around Cambodia followed the same fate to satiate the foreign thirst for sugar.

From 2007 to 2013, the period when most of the sugar plantations were set up, revenues from Cambodian sugar exports to ­Europe rose from $61,000 to ­almost $53 million, thanks to a preferential trade agreement called Everything But Arms. The legacy of that EU agreement has left a bitter taste.

According to local NGOs, since 2006 at least 3,500 Cambodian families have been forcibly evicted from their land to make room for sugar plantations: those who resisted were violently silenced, beaten or arrested.

Some received no compensation at all, others were forced to accept replacement land of significantly lower quality or a pittance to settle their cases, losing their only means of survival for a few hundreds, sometimes dozens, of dollars. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce who was contacted by email for a comment on the villagers’ allegations has not replied so far.

According to the UN Human Rights Commission, forced evictions are a clear violation of a series of basic human rights. “Theoretically, the government gave mandate to the local authorities to inform villagers about the land concessions. But I am not sure they did it properly,” says Kiev Lieng Kie, the district deputy governor in Kampong Speu and a member of the government-­appointed National Land Committee tasked with investigating the issue. Provincial authorities and village chiefs have routinely been accused by the evicted families of receiving bribes to endorse controversial land deals.

“In the past, local authorities have been far too complacent towards sugar companies: the compensation given to the people was not acceptable at all,” says Toek Nim, the elected commune chief of Amliang, in charge of 17 villages in Kampong Speu. According to her, half of the families under her jurisdiction have been affected by such land grabs. “If sugar companies will ask for more land here, I will not approve their requests.”

Short of alternatives, the vast ­majority of those who have resorted to work in the plantations are women, like the 64-year-old, soft-spoken Hai Morn. “I come here just to earn enough money to survive,” she says, sitting on a recently harvested field for a few minutes’ rest. “I cannot even sleep at night. I go to see my land every day. Some of it is still empty.” Around her, a few women are silently cutting sugar canes twice as tall as them, the only noise being that of the slashing ­sickles. Once cut, canes are carefully regrouped in bundles of 20, collected by a scraper and loaded on a truck. Dressed in ragtag clothes and worn-out gloves, scorched by the beating, tropical sun, the workers are already soaked in sweat after an hour. On a very good day, they are able to make as much as $5, but work is intermittent and so hard that many women are able to go to the plantation only half a week. Once the day is over, they will still have to prepare supper for the family and look after their children.

Lost in the countryside, Kork is the typical, rural Cambodian village. Made up of few hundred wooden houses, built on stilts to protect people from flooding during the rainy season, the village lies along a series of dirt roads filled with grazing farm animals, few cars and a recent, constant flow of trucks carrying sugar cane from the nearby plantation to the Phnom Penh Sugar Company (PPSC) factory, where the cane is processed, refined and turned into sugar.

The company is just one of those that have benefited from the Economic Land Concessions (ELC) given out by the Cambodian government. Since 2003, more than two million hectares, amounting to two-thirds of all arable land in Cambodia, have been leased to ­private agri-business companies and turned into rubber, sugar, cassava, banana and soybean plantations. More than 400,000 people, most of them subsistence farmers, have been affected by this unprecedented land grab, made easier by the fact that millions of Cambodians are still officially landless. During the Communist Khmer Rouge ­regime in the 1970s, private property in Cambodia was abolished and land registries were destroyed, erasing any record of land ownership. Millions of peasants kept on working the land they inherited from their ancestors but the lack of proper titles made them vulnerable when, in an effort to develop the country, the Cambodian government started issuing ELCs.

In Kampong Speu alone, the 9,000-hectare PPSC concession has been accused of encroaching on 2,000 hectares of farmland belonging to 1,100 local families. But the director of the company, Seng Nhak, says that the land was leased from the government and prefers to focus on the benefits brought by the plantation. The company states that the area now occupied by the sugar cane was not suitable for rice cropping and claims it brought electricity and a paved road linking the region with Phnom Penh, as well as employment opportunities for 4,000 people. “People here are known for being poor,” says Seng. “Workers lack discipline, both in the factory and in the sugar cane plantation. If they feel they have enough money to survive today, they don’t come to work. They are lazy.”

A few kilometres away from the wide, air-conditioned office of Seng, 40-year-old Chheuon Khorn listens to the company’s version of the facts with an ironic smile on her face. Her small plot of land, which features a wooden house and a few banana trees, sits just at the border of the plantation in Pis, a new village created by hundreds of displaced people. “All I know is that before, I could stay for two or three weeks without working, ’cause we had rice,” she says, before revealing she too was stripped of two hectares of land, ­receiving just $125 in compensation. “Now, if I don’t go to the plantation for one day, I don’t have anything to eat.” Unable to provide for her 15-year-old daughter, Chheoun was forced to take her out of school and send her to the ­plantation.

Despite a zero-tolerance policy on child labour enforced by many sugar companies, several families confess they are forced to make their children work in order to make ends meet. Children are ­often sneaked into the plantation without the knowledge of the companies. Srouch, a 13-year-old boy from Kork, has just come home after a day of labour. “I don’t like harvesting sugar cane, it is too hard for me,” he says, short of breath and visibly exhausted. His father, who works at the plantation, fell ill with a skin disease. In order to pay for his treatment, Srouch has to work as a substitute for him. “If the company catches us it will fine and kick us out, but we don’t have a choice,” his father says.

Pressed by a barrage of criticism, the Cambodian government has recently appointed an ad hoc committee tasked with compensating the affected families either economically or by giving them another piece of land. But most of the replacement plots that have been given out so far are unsuitable for growing rice and have been abandoned. Moreover, sugar plantations have significantly reduced the availability of arable land, causing prices to skyrocket and making it impossible for the affected families to buy new plots.

As a result, the price of rice has ­almost doubled, going from 500 riels (Dh0.5) to 900 per kilo. Unable to grow rice by themselves, families who work in the plantations buy it at inflated prices, often putting themselves in debt with banks.

In order to tackle the problem, ­local communities and NGOs have asked the EU to take responsibility for its use of Cambodian sugar by suspending the trade agreements between the EU and Phnom Penh, that account for 97 per cent of ­exports. But their hopes were dashed when the EU trade commissioner Karel de Gucht recently stated that he had no plans to launch an investigation into the Cambodian sugar industry, despite a resolution passed by the EU parliament in January 2013. Instead, the EU will press the Cambodian government to solve the issue.

De Gucht justified his decision by saying that the UN International ­Labour Organisation has not ­reported negatively on the industry. However, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights special rapporteur to Cambodia, Surya Subedi, reported “serious and widespread” human rights violations back in 2012.

Off the record, EU diplomats say the European Commission is extremely reluctant to review the current trade agreements with Cambodia for fear of jeopardising a trade worth €3.3 billion in 2013. Aware of the criticism, the EU ambassador to Cambodia, Jean-François Cautain, is keen to reassure me that the ­issue of land-grabbing has been a top priority since he took office in 2011. “Our bottom line is that the affected communities should have at least the same livelihood as before,” he says. “Moreover, people should have the choice between working for the sugar companies or having other means of life.”

Still, many of the affected families don’t want compensation but ask for their old land back. Last April, 200 Cambodian families filed a suit against a European company claiming they are the ­legitimate owners of lands now taken over by a foreign sugar company. So far, lawsuits filed by local communities have been unsuccessful and several rallies held to protest against the evictions have been often violently quelled by the police. “Villagers have filed many complaints at district and province level but they didn’t obtain anything,” says Toek, the commune chief of Amliang in Kampong Speu. “This has added to their sense of hopelessness.”

Back in his office, the district deputy governor Kiev defends the government’s conduct. “I recognise the fact that the compensated land is not as good as the previous one, but the government never ignored to assist the affected people,” he says. “That’s why the ad hoc committee was formed.” According to him, the Cambodian government has also asked the sugar companies to improve infrastructure in the ­region, by building additional roads to ease the movement of villagers. The EU ambassador Cautain is also confident that the problem will be resolved. “We are still at an early stage and there is no timetable in the negotiations yet. But the government seems extremely serious in fixing the problem. I can see there is goodwill,” he says.

At sunset, the streets of Kork come suddenly alive. Crammed on local tractors, groups of exhausted workers come back from the plantations, while herds of cows and goats hurry towards the local stream to drink. While families gather around their courtyard to have supper and a well-earned rest, Louv waits for her children to come back with something to eat. If they’re lucky, the kids will catch some wild frogs to complement the rice. Otherwise, they will go to sleep hungry, as always.

Despite her pugnacious and energetic demeanour, Louv is a mother running out of options. Unless a solution to the land issue is reached, she knows she won’t be able to leave anything to her children. “I am very worried for their future, but I don’t want more money,” she says, staring at the sun fading on the horizon. “I would rather die than accept it. I want my old land back.”

Matteo Fagotto is a freelance journalist focusing on African and Middle Eastern issues. His work has been published in The Guardian and The Observer (UK), Die Zeit (Germany) and Maclean’s (Canada).

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