Agriculture

This year’s prolonged drought and saltwater intrusion in the Mekong Delta has destroyed more than 81,000 hectares of prime shrimp breeding areas in eight provinces, says the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Shrimp farmers in Ca Mau Province in the very south of the country, ...

Farms, market gardens, packaging units and companies that export plants and other agricultural products to the EU are required to register with the relevant authorities. This will enable them to obtain certification from district agriculture and forestry offices, according to a recent announcement by the Ministry ...

Borneo, home to animals like orangutans, rhinos, elephants, and proboscis monkeys is also host to some of the fastest plantation expansion in the world. Now, a new study published on September 9 in Nature’s open access journal Scientific Reports examines how much of this expansion has been happening ...

Indonesia’s Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar has warned that palm-oil companies found responsible for clearing land through illegal burning – cloaking much of Southeast Asia in noxious haze each year – will be prosecuted. “If we let this carry on and don’t resolve it, ...

Banks have financed companies responsible for rainforest destruction in Southeast Asia to the tune of billions of dollars, a study showed on September 6, and called on lenders to stop “fuelling forest crime”. Southeast Asia is home to some of the world’s most diverse rainforests, but ...

A large group of about 100 men hired by an Indonesian palm oil firm took several investigators hostage last weekend in an apparent bid to stop their probe into the forest fires blamed for the region’s haze problem. According to Jakarta Globe, the captors, believed to be mobilized by PT Andika Permata ...

New data released by Cambodia’s independent credit reporting agency indicate a significant slowdown in the rate of lending during the second quarter of the year, a sign that banking industry experts claim is due to a tightening of lending criteria and less seasonal demand from ...

Debate has raged in Vietnam over the use of legal chemicals to artificially ripen fruits, after a facility in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong was caught ripening numerous immature durians this way last week. On September 1, an inspection team raided a fruit facility ...

The Mekong Delta, the rice, seafood and fruit granary of the country, is facing landslides and sinking, as it no longer receives enough silt because of limited floodwaters. “We have been living here for several generations and we have never seen such poor floodwaters until the ...

Climate change is threatening the Cambodian rice industry, and it is marginalised communities that will be worst affected unless the government takes action, according to a new study. The study’s authors, Sokuntheavy Hong and Jun Furuya, took historical climatic, socioeconomic and rice-yield data as their benchmark, ...