Deal #8779

Linking Cambodia’s northeast to Vietnam and Laos, Ratanakiri is today a hub of cross-border economic activity within the tripartite Development Triangle. Logging, often illicit, dominates trade, with some estimating that hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of timber are trucked into Vietnam each year.1 Forest clear-felling is frequently justified as necessary for conversion to industrial plantations and occurs behind a thin veil of legitimacy on land granted to companies by the Cambodian government through concessions, usually for between 70-99 years. According to publicly available information, approximately 15 percent of Ratanakiri’s landmass is subject to economic land concessions (ELCs),2 predominantly for rubber plantations, which thrive in the area’s red volcanic soils (Vize and Hornung, 2013).

The governments of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam formed the “Development Triangle” in 2004, approving a master plan for socio-economic cooperation in the areas of, inter alia, transport, trade, electricity and tourism in several bordering provinces in each country (Nguyen 20012).