Features
Hong Lai Huat focuses on food security with its Aoral Farm Agrihub
As featured on Khmer Times
Hong Lai Huat has been farming in Cambodia since 2008. The Singapore company got off to a rocky start, because its original crop was corn, which is labour-intensive and dependent on the right weather. It switched to cassava in 2013 because it is more resilient than maize – and saw profits take off.
Aoral Farm is now one of the largest privately owned cassava plantations and starch factories in the Kingdom. It occupies 10,000 hectares of land in Kampong Speu province. Sold under the CAMFARM brand, the farm supplies as much as 100,000 tonnes of cassava starch, also known as tapioca, a year.
The Coronavirus pandemic made Hong Lai Huat realise the importance of food security so it decided to sell off its Singapore Farm Resort, which was mainly focused on hotels, restaurants and beer gardens, and use the money to turn Aoral Farm into a mixed-use agricultural hub one seventh the size of Singapore.
