Khmer Times/Ros Chanveasna Wednesday, 06 April 2016
A new plan to protect the environment started taking shape yesterday when the Environment Ministry held a workshop to discuss ideas on how to convert numerous laws into a single code to govern the county’s natural resources.
It is expected the process will take two years to complete.
The government hopes the end product will unify the Kingdom’s disparate ministries and safeguard the Kingdom’s natural resources, which have come under threat from illegal deforestation and ministerial mismanagement.
E Vuthy, chair of the technical working group tasked with creating the code, said the Kingdom had pre-existing laws related to environmental protection and natural resource management, but those laws were enforced incongruously by separate ministries.
“Sometimes, the laws that are authorized contradict each other when they are implemented,” he said. “This has a negative impact for it to work efficiently.”
He said the Environment Ministry is attempting to convert the various laws into a single code to curb ministerial inefficiencies and overlap.
Late last month, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced a plan to create an environmental protection zone covering 900,000 hectares of forest in five provinces, after both the ministry of the environment and agriculture sent a joint proposal to the premier.
Technical Working Group member Brian Rohan said the implementation of the environmental code was an important factor in the management of the new protected areas, adding that it needed to be clearly classified and monitored on all levels of government, as people’s livelihoods depended on it.
“So that’s what we’re going to try to accomplish in the code, to create this kind of cooperative structure between relevant stakeholders to manage the forests properly,” he said.
Tek Vannara, Executive Director of The NGO Forum, praised the Ministry of Environment’s attempt to update and modernize the bill on environmental protection in the country, but said the government needs to ensure the code is enforced. Otherwise it will have no bearing.
“I resist highly valuing the existing laws to cover the environmental and natural resources in the country and what’s important is here, they [ministries] should enforce the existing laws properly and efficiently, otherwise it doesn’t matter at all.”
2 comments:
Protect environment my ass. You have these cpp monkeys have monkeys'plans to protect the environment in the kingdom of wonder?. Don't expect nothing from these cpp monkeys to get things working.
You can pass a million laws, but if no one obeyed these law, they're useless.
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