The Cambodian Rainforest Is Located To One Of The Poorest Countries In The World.

Interesting fact I learned today after examining some tin cans containing tuna and some frozen tuna from the supermarket and while contacting the companies behind these products. When it says the tuna (or any other fish plus shrimps for that matter) was caught in “Western Pacific Ocean” it almost always means that the fish is from the coast of Cambodia. This very poor least developed country however is known for the high number of children being kept from school and instead being forced to work on tuna-fishing boats.

‘Tagesschau’ says that from November 10th to November 12th Cambodians celebrate their ‘Water Festival’, the end of the rainy season and the days the Tonle Sap starts to change the direction of its flow.

‘Car Tires – Another Dirty Business’ that aired this week on ‘WDR’ in Germany is a documentary movie about how much Cambodians suffer under the tire-producing branch: Most of our wheels (from an EU-point of view) are produced in Thailand and the raw material, the rubber for these tires is produced in Cambodia. Not only does Thailand’s car industry hire foreign workers from Cambodia and gets away with paying them less than normal minimum wages by simply listing them as business partners instead of workers. But in Cambodia farmers also get expropriated off their lands so that the rubber-industry can grow their rubber-producing trees there. This is awful on so many levels: The Cambodian workers in Thailand don’t have the same rights as normal workers and thus get exploited while working for wages that often aren’t even enough to get their families a meal every day. For example if lets say the factory gets closed due to flooding after heavy rain these workers don’t get any payment at all, but are expected to standby until the factory starts producing again.
For these rubber plantations in Cambodia farmers lose their jobs as…well farmers. There are no fields to grow food on after the farmers get removed and the fields get replaced by plantations and so they have to go begging. Some communities even had their graveyards destroyed without even being granted enough time to remove their diseased. After protests the Cambodian government later paid some recompensation for these expropriations, but the amount of money was low even by Cambodian standards. While some farmers then got a new job on these rubber plantations this situation isn’t ideal either. They are forced to spread pesticides that are even illegal in the EU and in the USA due to making nearby plants or food they grow nearby toxic. Of course these pesticides also do damage to the health of the people who spray them as these workers of course don’t get any protective clothing. And when something goes wrong – like a natural disaster or heavy rain making work on these plants temporarily impossible – these workers don’t get any wages at all.
The documentary movie ended with a little advertisement for retreaded tires. According to the documentary movie these tires cause the least problems, despite being – apparently for no reason – extremely unpopular in the EU.

‘Car Tires – Another Dirty Business’ that aired this week on ‘WDR’ in Germany is a documentary movie about how much Cambodians suffer under the tire-producing branch: Most of our wheels (from an EU-point of view) are produced in Thailand and the raw material, the rubber for these tires is produced in Cambodia. Not only does Thailand’s car industry hire foreign workers from Cambodia and gets away with paying them less than normal minimum wages by simply listing them as business partners instead of workers. But in Cambodia farmers also get expropriated off their lands so that the rubber-industry can grow their rubber-producing trees there. This is awful on so many levels: The Cambodian workers in Thailand don’t have the same rights as normal workers and thus get exploited while working for wages that often aren’t even enough to get their families a meal every day. For example if lets say the factory gets closed due to flooding after heavy rain these workers don’t get any payment at all, but are expected to standby until the factory starts producing again.
For these rubber plantations in Cambodia farmers lose their jobs as…well farmers. There are no fields to grow food on after the farmers get removed and the fields get replaced by plantations and so they have to go begging. Some communities even had their graveyards destroyed without even being granted enough time to remove their diseased. After protests the Cambodian government later paid some recompensation for these expropriations, but the amount of money was low even by Cambodian standards. While some farmers then got a new job on these rubber plantations this situation isn’t ideal either. They are forced to spread pesticides that are even illegal in the EU and in the USA due to making nearby plants or food they grow nearby toxic. Of course these pesticides also do damage to the health of the people who spray them as these workers of course don’t get any protective clothing. And when something goes wrong – like a natural disaster or heavy rain making work on these plants temporarily impossible – these workers don’t get any wages at all.
The documentary movie ended with a little advertisement for retreaded tires. According to the documentary movie these tires cause the least problems, despite being – apparently for no reason – extremely unpopular in the EU.

‘Domradio’ now reported about an innocent Cambodian man who – of course against his own will – was sold by some ‘corrupt public officials from the neighborhood’ to a Cambodian palm oil plantation. There he was held captive and forced to do hard farm work while the corrupt public officials got paid by the plantation owner just like you would pay for a new draft horse someone sold to you. No police officer came to find and free him, so he freed himself. Later he was invited by the Roman-Catholic church to speak in front of a congress. His speech meanwhile started a discussion about the origins of the goods bought by the Roman-Catholic church of Australia. The dioceses there now do some research to find out if their goods actually were produced by forced labor or child-labor, too.