The signs of change are many and are very convincing (Barun Roy).
One of them should be wrong. Jo Brinkley spent much of his time in Bangkok and while Barun Roy is still in Cambodia. Here what he witnessed:
A 60-storey skyscraper soaring above the low, monotonous spread of red-tiled roofs of Phnom Penh? Don’t be surprised. After several years of slow growth, Cambodia is stirring again, and when an economy turns, real estate is usually where an emerging nation stamps its first ambitious footprints. Cambodia is no exception...
It’s an “uprising,” literally, now spreading to other parts of the country as well, especially Seam Ream [Siem Reap?] to the north, the once-sleepy outpost that’s now the country’s second-largest city. Fuelling the boom is a new law, passed in May last year, which allows foreigners to own up to 70 per cent of any property above the ground-floor level that’s not within 30 km of a border.
Cambodia is still an LDC (least developed country), with its 15 million mainly agriculturist population surviving notionally on $1 a day. But the LDC status allows the country to have quota- and duty-free access to most world markets, which an increasingly pro-private-sector government now sees as an advantage. Export policies have been liberalised and tax reforms have been implemented to let investors exploit this benefit to the full. The government also wants to leverage Cambodia’s membership of the economically resurgent Greater Mekong sub-region, which offers investors the prospects of a wider regional market...
All this has spurred a fresh investor interest in Cambodia and triggered an explosion of demand for commercial and living spaces. New apartment blocks are proliferating all over the place... The popular impression of Cambodia is still that of an Asian “Wild West,” where ganja, guns and sex can be had in plenty, corruption runs through all levels, roads are dusty and easily flooded, and all kinds of backpackers, outcasts, drifters, paedophiles and alcoholics feel at home. In parts, that may still be true, but the signs of change are many and convincing.
There’s a rush of new hotels, restaurants and Western-style shopping malls, and Phnom Penh’s first multiplex, licensed to show Hollywood movies, has just made its debut. Fund transfers through domestic banks are on the rise. Car sales are strong, helped by easy bank loans. The telecom network has already spread to three international gateways and more than 20,000 km of fibre-optic cables. The country’s first communication satellite could be launched in early 2013. Roads are being upgraded with help from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Trains are running again on the country’s once-defunct railway under an Australian concessionaire.
The economy remains strong. Garment exports, Cambodia’s second major business after tourism, are on course for a 30 per cent rise this year over last year’s $2.99 billion earning. As for tourism, 42 large-scale projects worth $2.6 billion were approved in the first five months of this year, more than double from a year ago. Club Med is considering making an entry. ADB has just announced a three-year, $500-million programme for projects in agriculture, education, finance, water supply and transport. And Cambodia’s long-awaited securities exchange is ready to start trading by the end of this year.
15 July 2011 2:55 AM
Anonymous said...
Neither of them are wrong; they both report on different subject-fields: Joel Brinkley focuses on socio-political realities facing the country, whilst Barun Roy reports on fast-paced urban-commercial growth ("uprise") in the cities.
Cambodia is not alone among Asian nations to be experiencing this kind of 'development' - the kind of boom-town artificial commercial expansion that is mainly being fueled by injections of foreign capital induced by lax investment laws and sleazy officialdom. Some locals might be recruited as cleaners, maids, shop assistants, bank clerks etc. as a consequence of these commercial "uprisings". But these instances are being imposed on the country regardless, and often at cruel expense of basic rights of the citizenry who are losing out through forced evictions (the law on expropriation could see to that as long as it's not a mango tree planted by ethnic Vietnamese!) and a host of violations we all should be familiar with by now.
Garment workers have been reported to have fainted en masse due to ill-enforced health and safety standards in the factories. It's fine to have foreign projects and investments that create jobs for local people, but the need for economic opportunities should be in balance with social-political reforms so that local population (minus the political-economic elites or "murderous plutocrats") take an equitable share out of the national economic pie, and the country doesn't attract those capitalist sharks whose seedy activities in their own countries and the legal pressure they face back home have driven them to come and try their luck in 'anything goes Cambodia' in the first place.
Even without the prospect of oil revenues, a relatively small country like Cambodia, sparsely populated and endowed with naturally fertile landmass as well as being one of Asia's (if not one of the world's) most attractive tourist destinations has every potential to become affluent economically if it is managed under a sound, clean and transparent political-administrative system.
So, no this kind of development is not of, by and for the people. It is first and foremost for the foreign investors and the native plutocrats only.
In future, even overseas Khmers coming to visit their country once every four years or so will struggle to afford overnight accommodation available on Techo-Morakat Island (Koh Pous) judging by some of the price quotes on rented accommodation there. If the island turns out to be another Phuket, then ordinary Khmers can forget about it!
Which leads one to Sok An's quip about subject matters like Angkor Wat and the border being off-limit to the public lest it causes anarchy! (see WikiLeaks).
Kouprey
No comments:
Post a Comment