By Patrick Winn
January 4, 2013
Cambodians sitting along
railroad tracks outside their shanty homes in the Boeng Kak slum area
of Phnom Penh in 2009. (NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)
Cambodia's latest approved mega-project is a doozy: an $11.2 billion China-funded endeavor to build a steel mine in the country's north linked to a coastal port via 250 miles of railway tracks.
It's difficult to overemphasize this project's scale, which amounts
in dollar figures to nearly 90 percent of the country's current annual
GDP. As an Asian Development Bank official tells Reuters, it "must be the largest-ever project in Cambodia."
Cambodians and the world at large have reason to wonder about the
project's impact: building a 250-mile railway is likely to trigger home
evictions, which have a reputation for violence and abuse in Cambodia.
The government also acknowledges that they haven't completed an
assessment of the mine's potential environmental damage.
The entire project is surrounded with questions. You might assume
that Iv Tek -- Cambodia's transport minister, who presided over the
deal's preliminary approval -- would be the man with the answers.
But when the small-but-aggressive Cambodia Daily newspaper confronted
the minister with questions, they found that "he did not know a great
deal about the project."
“I don’t know what the companies will do," he told the newspaper. "Let’s wait and see all together."
Is he really that clueless? Is he playing dumb to ward off tough
questions? Either way, these are not so comforting words from an
official holding the reigns of a project that will drastically shape
lives and Cambodia's already ailing environment.
For more quality reporting onthe project's lack of transparency, check out this recent piece in the Cambodia's Daily.
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