UN General Assembly
2016

We have made considerable progress in education, health care and infrastructure. Similarly, we have successfully fought AIDS and malaria. We have undertaken a long and difficult fight against corruption. Our Ministries of the Environment and Agriculture are striving to correct the mistakes that have been made with respect to forestry licenses. The poverty rate has dropped every year by 1 per cent and we have experienced an average growth rate of more than 7 per cent since 1994. In Cambodia, we are addressing an issues that can truly hinder sustainable development — mines and explosive remnants of war. We have made the eradication of these deadly devices an eighteenth Sustainable Development Goal in Cambodia, similar to what we did with the Millennium Development Goals. Our country, which has gained has considerable and painful experience in demining, has been participating in peacekeeping operations by sending demining contingents since 2006. Currently, more than 900 women and men of these contingents, as well as engineers, doctors and military police, are working in Lebanon, Mali, the Central African Republic, the Sudan and South Sudan.