Illegal logging is widespread in Cambodia,
and efforts to prevent it have had only a limited impact. Much of the
wood is destined for China.
By Michael Sullivan/NPR
China's demand for natural resources is being felt in a big way in Cambodia.
Illegal
logging and economic land concessions are threatening Cambodia's
dwindling forests, which now echo the sound of chainsaws.
Prey
Lang forest — an eight-hour journey north and east of the capital, Phnom
Penh — is one of the forests where illegal loggers see money signs on
the trees.
Supply And Demand
"It's
just like in the United States in the 1960s, when every single redwood
tree was a target for illegal logger[s]," says Suwanna Gauntlett, head
of the Phnom Penh office of Wildlife Alliance. "It's the same thing in
Cambodia. It's a natural resource worth a lot of money."
And
many people with money — particularly China's growing middle class — are
eager to spend it on luxury hardwood furniture, says Tracy Farrell of
Conservation International.
"You also have the fact that other
countries have been culling or reducing the extraction of their own
luxury wood," Farrell says. "Thailand has been becoming much more strict
about illegal wood leaking out of their country, so that puts the
pressure on the countries that are less strict. ... Laos and Cambodia
are really, really struggling."
Both Conservation International
and Wildlife Alliance have been working with Cambodia's government to
protect some forests. Those efforts have been hugely successful in
slowing the rate of forest decline there, but without this protection,
Gauntlett says, it would be a different case.
"Six months — six to eight months," she says. "It'd all be gone. It would be wiped out, believe me."
But
Prey Lang forest doesn't have the same kind of protection. And the
forests are not just threatened by illegal loggers, but by so-called
economic concessions — large tracts of land awarded by the government to
agribusinesses on the forests' borders. It has become land often used
to launder wood taken out of the forest illegally.
'We All Depend On It To Live'
Eoun
Sopapheap, a local activist in Sandan, says he's tired of watching the
forest disappear. He and a few others journey into the forest to catch
illegal loggers in the act.
"The forest is our rice bowl," he
says with the help of a translator. "We all depend on it to live. We tap
the resin trees there and sell the sap in the market, and we use the
money to buy rice and to pay for our children's school fees. If we lose
those trees, we lose everything — so it's up to us."
He fires
up his motorcycle and starts the trek into the forest. In less than an
hour, the group spots the first of many newly fallen trees not far from
the road. They hear a chainsaw humming in the distance.
It's a
resin tree, one of the men explains — its trunk still oozing sap. It's
worth about $750 to a logger, he says. But for those who live here, a
source of sustainable income has now been eliminated forever. The
chainsaw draws the group deeper into the forest.
The Hunt For Illegal Loggers
The
underbrush is thick and rips at the flesh. It takes about 30 minutes to
go 100 yards, then a clearing — and a glum-looking logger.
He says he's not from around here; his boss offered him $10 to cut this tree.
"I know it's illegal," he says, "but what can I do? I don't have any other work, and I have to support my family."
The
activists let him go, but they keep his chainsaw. They're after bigger
fish, and find one on the road a few miles farther in.
It's a
tractor pulling a large stack of freshly cut timber. The man who owns
it, the driver claims, is the district deputy police chief, who shows up
not long after, looking annoyed.
The activists tell him they're burning the wood and reporting him
to the Interior Ministry. The policeman protests, claiming the wood was
legally cut and belongs not to him, but to the owner of a land
concession in the district.
Chhim Savuth, with the Cambodian
Center for Human Rights, doesn't believe any of it. First, he says, that
land concession is some 30 miles from here, and the license expired a
year ago.
Exasperated, the police chief whips out his phone and
says he's calling his boss. But he's not talking about his police
superior. He's talking about the owner of the company — the man paying
him to protect the illegal shipment. He walks away a bit, but is still
within earshot.
The human rights activist listens in and says
he overhears the boss telling the cop to offer the activists money to
make the problem go away. But it doesn't come to that.
Just
then, several hard-looking men on motorbikes pull up — gun thugs serving
as reinforcements. The activists are suddenly outnumbered in the middle
of the forest, and it's getting dark. They decide to retreat.
Stopping The Practice
Back
in the capital, Ou Virak, who heads the Cambodian Center for Human
Rights, says that was a good call — especially with the police involved.
"In
any of these situations — in the middle of nowhere, with so much money
and so much interests at stake — they're willing to do quite a lot," he
says. "So it could turn ugly pretty quickly. If anything happened, they
could just blame anybody."
Virak says the incident perfectly
illustrates the extent of the collusion between local officials and the
illegal logging trade in many parts of the country, and how difficult it
will be to stop the practice.
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