Petitions on parade

About 300 villagers and farmers representing nearly 2,300 families from eight provinces yesterday descended on the capital to deliver three different petitions to the ministries of land management and agriculture, and the National Assembly. ‘We have filed many petitions to the Land Management Ministry about land grabbing by traders, authorities and powerful people . . . [but] there has been no acceptable solution for the people,’ said Nhil Pheap, of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmers’ Communities and a coordinator of the event. ‘Now, some [government-recognised tycoons] are using soldiers to dismantle and grab people’s land.’ Lay Phalim, an official who received the petition at the Land Management Ministry, said a team had been dispatched to ‘complete the task’, but that it ‘cannot be finished in one day’. In the document handed to the Agriculture Ministry, petitioners requested the government invest $400 million to bolster the local agricultural sector. ‘I asked the government not to import vegetables and rice, because local farmers cultivate these products and we do not have the market to sell it,’ said Hul Duok, a farmer from Prey Veng province. ‘If we do sell our products, they are sold at a low price because of foreign imports.’ Meanwhile, in the petition to the National Assembly, signatories asked for authorities to ‘stop making policies or laws that affect the freedom and living [conditions] of people’.

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