Cambodia is booming but as the New York Times recently reported, history may be turning full cycle in the form of land grabs and population displacements:"With the economy on the rise, land is being seized for logging, agriculture, mining, tourism and fisheries, and in Phnom Penh, soaring land prices have touched off what one official called a frenzy of land grabs by the rich and powerful. The seizures can be violent, including late-night raids by the police and military. Sometimes, shanty neighborhoods burn down, apparently victims of arson."
In fact, a February 2008 Amnesty International report entitled Rights Razed: Forced Evictions in Cambodia raised the concern that 150,000 Cambodians across the country are at risk of being evicted in the wake of development projects, land disputes and outright land grabbing, and concluded there is an urgent need to bolster the legal framework to protect people from forced evictions.
Certainly land grabs and land disputes in frontier emerging markets (Think Russia in the 1990s...) or where the rule of law has weakened (Think Zimbabwe...) are nothing new. Nevertheless, such occurrences should give investors and property owners, no matter how large or small or well connected, a cause for concern...