More than 15 months after a Global Witness report revealed that Vietnam’s state-owned rubber giant, the Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG) had illegally cleared land and displaced communities in Cambodia, The Cambodia Daily recently reported that the company has announced that it will accept and respond to complaints from those whose lives it has damaged.
Vietnam Rubber Group, which counts the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) as a shareholder, has amassed more than 140,000 hectares of land. The 2013 Global Witness report—“Rubber Barons: How Vietnamese Companies and International Financiers are Driving a Land Grabbing Crisis in Cambodia and Laos”—exposed how Vietnamese rubber companies were cutting often illicit land deals with the Cambodian government without consideration for the communities already living there.
Now, according to Global Witness, after extensive lobbying to take responsibility for the communities it has displaced and the destruction of forests they depended upon, VRG has announced that it is committed to resolving complaints.
Many of the VRG land concessions are in remote areas of the country and have displaced indigenous communities whose cultures revolve around the forests they inhabit. Those ethnic groups have also seen traditional burial grounds destroyed and replaced by rubber plantations.
Another Vietnamese rubber giant, the privately owned Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), which is also partly funded by the World Bank and also accused by Global Witness of illegally clearing forests and displacing communities, recently went under the microscope of the IFC ombudsmen, who is now mediating negotiations between the company and affected communities.