Reckless mining in Prey Lang takes toll on environment

Villagers in Kratie and Kampong Thom provinces are experiencing health problems because of mining at sites such as this one in the Prey Lang forest, according to a local rights group. Photograph: supplied

Tuesday, 08 May 2012
May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

Chemical substances used in about 3,000 mining drills operating in the Prey Lang forest in Kratie and Kampong Thom provinces are wreaking environmental havoc and making people sick, a report by the Cambodian Center for Human Rights released yesterday says.

Substances used by a number of Chinese-run companies, businessmen and villagers to mine gold have caused 70 per cent of the trees in the area to die, and the contamination of nearby rivers and lakes, according to the group.

“Starting a year ago, villagers and animals in the community began having a lot of health problems they never used to, and at least 50 buffaloes and cows have died from drinking river water,” the report states.

ដើមអម្ពិលទើប តែភ្ញាក់ដឹង អំពីចិនក្រឡឹងព្រៃឡង់ ឯពួកយួនមើលមិនឃើញទេ!

រយៈពេល៣ថ្ងៃ CCHR រកឃើញ សកម្មភាព អណាធិបតេយ្យ ដ៏ធំនៅតំបន់ ព្រៃឡង់ ដោយពុំមាន ការទប់ស្កាត់

Monday, 07 May 2012
ដោយៈសេង ផល្លាភ
DAP-News

ភ្នំពេញ៖ មជ្ឈណ្ឌល សិទ្ធិមនុស្សកម្ពុជា (CCHR) បន្ទាប់ពីបានធ្វើការ ស្រាវជ្រាវអស់ រយៈពេល៣ថ្ងៃរួមមក បានរកឃើញ នូវសកម្មភាព អាណាធិបតេយ្យ បំផ្លិចបំផ្លាញ ធនធានធម្មជាតិ ក្នុងតំបន់ព្រៃឡង់ ដែលបង្កឡើង ដោយក្រុមហ៊ុនចិន បានឃុបឃិតគ្នា ជាមួយកម្លាំង ប្រដាប់អាវុធ និងអាជ្ញាធរមូលដ្ឋាន ក្នុងតំបន់ នោះ ផ្ទាល់ ហើយករណីនេះដែរ CCHR សុំឲ្យមានការស៊ើប អង្កេតជាបន្ទាន់ ដើម្បីទប់ស្កាត់ សកម្មភាពទាំងនេះ។

យោងតាម របាយការណ៍ របស់មជ្ឈណ្ឌល សិទ្ធិមនុស្សកម្ពុជា ដែលមជ្ឈមណ្ឌលព័ត៌មាន ដើមអម្ពិលទទួលបាន នៅថ្ងៃទី៧ ខែឧសភា ឆ្នាំ២០១២នេះ បានឲ្យដឹងថា ក្នុងរយៈពេល៣ថ្ងៃ CCHR បានរកឃើញ សកម្មភាពអាណាធិបតេយ្យ ដ៏ធំនៅតំបន់ព្រៃឡង់ ដែលអាច និយាយថា ជាវិនាសកម្មធនធានធម្មជាតិ និងបំពុលផ្នែក បរិស្ថាននោះគឺ ការជីករុករករ៉ែមាស យ៉ាងអាណាធិបតេយ្យ ដោយពុំមានការ ទប់ស្កាត់។

សកម្មភាពទាំងនេះ គឺកើតឡើងនៅ ក្នុងតំបន់ព្រៃឡង់ ភាគខាងត្បូង ចំណុច ប្រសព្វពីរខេត្ត គឺខេត្តក្រចេះ និងកំពង់ធំ (២០គីឡូម៉ែត្របួនជ្រុង ជុំវិញតំបន់ភ្នំជី) មានចំណុច សោមដេប៉ូ ផ្សាតាកែវ រោងជប៉ុន រលួសតូច រលួសធំ ថ្មពួយ អន្សមផ្អូម អូរស្ពង់ អូរនាង អូរចោទ អូរអន្លុង និងកន្លែងដទៃទៀត។

Report on the destruction of natural resource in Cambodia, especially in Prey Lang area: CCHR

Uncontrolled mining exploration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49JgrKT8fo

https://www.box.com/s/ffe9433d2eed38379fef


https://www.box.com/s/d1487209b92e22d0f5c3

South China Sea headed for troubled waters: marine experts

Ships and a floating oil barrier are deployed in South China Sea

HANOI (AFP) — Polluted, crossed by busy shipping lanes, and disputed by many countries, the South China Sea has taken an environmental battering that threatens future food supplies, marine scientists have warned.

In a decade the sea -- at the heart of a densely populated and rapidly industrialising region -- has lost 16 percent of its coral reefs and coastal mangroves and 30 percent of its sea grass, says the United Nations.

The exploitation of its fisheries, both legal and illegal, by family boats and industrial deep sea trawlers now threatens to deplete fish stocks that millions of people rely on, a Hanoi conference heard last week.

"The key issues on a basin scale are habitat degradation and loss, overfishing and land-based pollution," said Vo Si Tuan, who served as Vietnam representative to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) South China Sea Project.

"There are many, many problems, but these are the biggest."

The South China Sea is ringed by China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, with about 350 million people living along its coastal areas.

"There are large populations heavily dependent, directly and indirectly, on fishing, in one of the world's most biodiverse marine areas," said Keith Symington, a marine specialist with the World Wide Fund for Nature.

"The international trends are more pronounced in the South China Sea.

"Boats have to go further and fish longer to catch the same amount of fish and they are catching smaller fish," said Symington, speaking to AFP at the fourth Global Conference on Oceans, Coasts and Islands.

"There are a lot of illegal or unreported catches, there are fishing boats flying flags of convenience, there are loopholes."

The UN has highlighted the damage done to coral reefs, seagrass, mangroves and wetlands that are crucial for biodiversity and fish breeding.

Vietnam's Halong Bay, a world heritage-listed island scape, is a case in point, said Michael Hayes, an expert on tourism in protected marine areas.

"There are 138 coral species in Halong Bay, but most of the reefs are being destroyed by heavy sedimentation," he said.

Erosion from deforestation along the Red River is pouring silt into the bay, where shrimp farms and land reclamation have destroyed mangroves and heavy shipping, coal mining and tourism are polluting the waters.

"There is more and more pressure on the South China Sea, from fisheries but also from other exploitation like oil and gas and ballast waters from ships that introduce invasive species," he said.

Vietnam, aiming to protect its coastal areas, plans to send fewer and larger fishing boats deeper into the South China Sea, said Nguyen Chu Hoi, director of the Vietnam Institute of Fisheries Economics and Planning.

The communist government plans to declare 15 marine protected areas this year, he said, and to reduce its fleet of 90,000 mostly family-run boats by 30 percent over five years while encouraging more off-shore fishing.

The ships may be heading into troubled waters, and not just during the annual typhoon season that is set to worsen with climate change.

Fishing has already led to clashes on the high seas, with Chinese vessels and the Indonesian coastguard firing at Vietnamese ships.

Managing the South China Sea is complicated by the fact that at its heart lie the Spratly islands, which are claimed in full or in part by Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

"The South China Sea is a highly contested area," said Robert Jara of the Philippines' environment and natural resources department.

"One of the basic approaches now is putting aside the claims while we address the environment and the resource degradation of the South China Sea.

"If you address the claims before addressing the environment, at the end of the day everybody loses out."

VN to help Cambodia with power projects, or will it help destroy Cambodia's Se San River environment?

Saturday, June 16, 2007
Vietnam firm to help Cambodia with power projects

Thanh Nien News (Hanoi)

The Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) group will undertake a feasibility study for the construction of two hydropower plants in Cambodia‘s Ratanakiri and Kratie provinces.

An agreement to the effect was signed in Phnom Penh Friday by EVN deputy general director Lam Du Son and Khlaut Randy, Cambodia’s Secretary of State, Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy.

EVN will carry out surveys for the proposed projects – Low Se San 1 (90 MW) and Low Se San 2 (420 MW) – on the Se San River in the northwestern region.

The plants are expected to meet the increasing demand for power in Cambodia’s remote areas and also supply to Viet Nam.

Vietnamese coastal wetlands facing environmental disaster

LOFTY LODGINGS: A diurnal tide rises and falls twice each day in the Red River Delta, ranging from two to four meters across the coastal zone. At high tide, these dwellings, serving as watchtowers and homes for aquaculture plantation workers, look more like regular shacks.

05/02/2007
The Powell River Peak

Powell River Peak reporter Luke Brocki travelled to Cambodia and Vietnam after winning a fellowship administered by the Jack Webster Foundation and funded by the Canadian International Development Agency.

The final installment in his series of development-related stories explores the impacts of aquaculture on coastal communities and mangrove forests in Vietnam's Xuan Thuy National Park in Giao Thuy district, Nam Dinh province, about 150 kilometres southeast of Hanoi. The people of this coastal area, like much of the population of Vietnam, rely on the marine environment for food and livelihood, but a classic tragedy of the commons is leading to environmental degradation and exploitation of resources at speeds that outpace conservation efforts.

Part four of a series

A national park under siege

Women in conical hats scurry around the shoreline, sifting through sacks of clams they just hauled ashore. A large, green scale buckles under the weight of load after load of farmed bivalves. The women pile the weighed clams into a truck and take rafts back to the dykes that house their nets. The burdened truck heads northeast. If recent history is to be trusted, it's heading for China, Vietnam's main importer of shellfish. The second of two diurnal tides comes in, flooding sparse stands of baby mangroves in Vietnam's Xuan Thuy National Park.

The park, in the Giao Thuy district of Nam Dinh province, may house the country's first Ramsar site-a wetland of international importance based on a 1975 treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands-but it has also caught up with the country's economic reforms and is facing habitat degradation, environmental pollution and dangerous exploitation of resources.

The economic reforms began in 1986. Dubbed "doi moi", or renovation, by the Communist Party of Vietnam, the reforms permitted and encouraged free-market enterprises and abandoned the push to collectivize the industrial and agricultural operations of the country. They also resulted in rapid economic changes in the country's coastal areas and conflicts over the management of collective property.

Academics working in the area draw parallels to Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which introduced a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The tragedy unfolds thusly: A coastline is shared by local clam farmers. The farmers wish to maximize their yield and so will increase the size of their farm whenever possible. Of course, each farmer receives all the proceeds from each additional clam they harvest, while the coastline is slightly degraded by each additional clam. Since all farmers share the disadvantages, the sensible course of action seems to be the further addition of clams. Economically speaking, this seems rational no matter how degraded the coastline gets, since the gain is always greater to each farmer than the individual share of the distributed environmental costs.

Doi moi's lasting legacy

But 20 years after doi moi, employment opportunities in the 15,000-hectare park and surrounding areas are limited, forest and wetland areas are greatly reduced due to unsustainable environmental practices and fish stocks are on the decline. Still, aquaculture continues to rise.

According to the Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development, (MCD), Vietnam's only non-governmental organization (NGO) devoted exclusively to social and environmental issues in the country's coastal zones, livelihoods in the park are increasingly unstable and conflicts are growing. MCD believes solutions to poverty and livelihood problems along Vietnam's densely populated coasts must accompany answers to the region's environmental troubles.

Phung Thi Thin, 54, president of a women's association in Giao Xuan commune, one of five communes in the Giao Thuy district on the peripheries of the park's protected core zone, works to educate other women in the area about the harm of aquaculture and alternative livelihoods. "In recent years, people in this commune have increased aquaculture production and that destroyed the environment," she says through a translator. "I'm looking for opportunities to create new jobs for women and reduce the aquaculture exploitation."

The exploitation doesn't end with clams. The area is home to 46,000 people, many of them farmers eager to cash in on the area's crops, including oysters, crab and shrimp. It all comes at the expense of the park's mangrove forests, as farmers living around the park enter the core zone to farm. Vietnamese mangroves have been under assault for years, starting with the Agent Orange defoliation during the American war. The agent has since been discovered to contain cancer-causing dioxin and is again making headlines after a Canadian environmental company's recent findings that contamination levels in the city of Da Nang continue to exceed concentrations by 300 to 400 times higher than what is considered acceptable. The assaults on the forests continued in the forms of logging, expansion of rice farming and most recently, aquaculture.

Shrimp farming is particularly devastating to the environment, reports the World Rainforest Movement, one of the founding members of the Global Forest Coalition, an informal and inclusive coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples' Organizations engaged in the global policy debate related to forests.

According to the coalition, shrimp farming tends to be a short-term activity, with many farmers moving into aquaculture without sufficient skills or money for sustainable infrastructure. The resulting farms render the land useless after as little as three years and more mangrove stands are then cleared to continue shrimp production. Intensive shrimp farming also uses antibiotics and chemical additives to increase yield, which poison the surrounding water systems.

Further mangroves are killed by high water levels, according to park director Nguyen Viet Cach. Shrimp farming also floods areas for longer periods than those experienced through natural tidal cycles. Since mangroves respire through the roots at low tide, Nguyen Viet Cach says, prolonged submersion kills the trees.

Then, there are social problems. A study by Nguyen Huu Ninh, director of the Hanoi-based Center for Environment Research, Education and Development, looks at per-capita income inequality across various livelihoods and finds that, in a nutshell, aquaculture makes rich land owners richer and poor farmers poorer. The trend toward inequality amplifies the pressure on poorer households caused by other factors, such as population growth, land limitation and rising costs of living, states the study. The response of many households is migration to cities.

Search for alternatives

The doi moi process, while reforming coastal life, has also increased economic opportunities in urban areas, agrees Phung Thi Thin. This has also affected Giao Xuan.

The commune saw an exodus of male labourers, lured away by construction, carpentry and transportation jobs in the cities. This led to changing gender roles, loss of skills in the local workforce and a weakening family structure. Now that women are responsible for managing land, Phung Thi Thin hopes education and community empowerment will catalyze a change. "With the support of MCD, we're training women in ecotourism in this commune," she says. "Women in this commune could provide services for tourists: cooking, hospitality, traditional performances, guided tours . . . "

Last July, commune representatives joined MCD officers on a four-day study tour to ecotourism sites in Sapa, a hill town about 400 kilometres northwest of Hanoi. The tour aimed to show community-based tourism in practice to the women in attendance and teach hands-on skills for future ecotourism in the national park.

Nguyen Thu Hue, director of MCD, hopes the ecotourism pilot, poised to enter a live trial this summer, will shift the region's focus away from aquaculture. "It's market-driven," she says. "Villagers know very well this practice is unsustainable, but if they don't do it, their neighbours will do it."

The former lawyer isn't praying for a miracle. Familiar with the country's bureaucracy, she chooses to focus the centre's efforts on grassroots advocacy on the ground and policy changes in government chambers. "In 2006, the environment started appearing on government agendas," she says. "One per cent of Vietnam's GDP (gross domestic product) is used for the environment, but action is very slow. The coast is very long and we're a small NGO."

MCD also works to analyze coastal problems and develop methodologies to fix them. "We closely monitor government development," says Nguyen Thu Hue. "Everything we do produces a paper, a report, a conference. We package the product to be sold to the government."

With today's national development efforts to greatly expand tourism, Nguyen feels an historic opportunity presents itself to improve the lives of many poor people, while restoring the coastal environment on which they depend.

Nguyen Viet Cach hopes she's right. "In Vietnam, money from so-called ecotourism doesn't go toward conservation. Hopefully this will change. In the future I hope there will be a law in place to funnel some of that money into conservation."

Xuan Thuy National Park is a snapshot of Vietnam's vast gallery of social change and Canadian research is paving the way to understanding the region's struggles. The links between agrarian transformation, industrialization, migration, urbanization, environmental impacts, globalization and geopolitical implications are being explored under the banner of the Major Collaborative Research Initiative program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A team of 21 researchers from three generations of scholars is collaborating on a project called The Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia, meant to reformulate the theory of agrarian transition in today's rapidly changing world. Research projects focusing on Vietnam and Southeast Asia's 10 other nations are currently underway at 16 different universities and research institutions. The result will include at least 45 graduate theses, most prepared at Canadian universities.

After giving out exploitation concessions on the Tonle Sap, Hun Sen now realizes his policy is an environmental disaster in the making

Monday, March 5, 2007
Cambodian leader warns that development poses threat to 'Great Lake'

The Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Cambodia's prime minister warned Monday that increasing population and over-exploitation of fisheries and wildlife pose a dire threat to his country's Tonle Sap, or "Great Lake," the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia.

"The lake is facing a serious threat of over-exploitation and its ecosystem has become quite fragile," Prime Minister Hun Sen said at a national forum on the Tonle Sap held in Phnom Penh.

"Honestly, if this problem is not addressed decisively and soon enough, Cambodia could face a serious environmental disaster," he warned.

He said the clearing of nearby forest land for large-scale agriculture is resulting in the seepage of fertilizer and pesticides into the lake, creating serious environmental problems.

Tonle Sap is 200 kilometers (120 miles) northwest of Phnom Penh and touches six provinces. Hun Sen said the lake's basin is home to about 4 million of Cambodia's 14 million people, and that about 40 percent of the country's population derive some benefit from its resources.

The lake harbors a rich biosphere of more than 200 species of fish, 42 types of reptiles, 225 species of birds and 46 kinds of mammals.

C. Lawrence Greenwood, vice president of the Asian Development Bank, said weak governance, severe poverty and social inequity, and conflicts over management of fisheries and natural resources pose serious threats to the lake's ecosystem and the livelihoods of people who depend on it.

"The great lake provides daily sustenance and livelihoods for over 1 million people, many of whom are among the poorest in Cambodia," Greenwood said at the seminar.

Tonle Sap covers approximately 250,000 hectares (618,000 acres) during the dry season and expands to about 1.25 million hectares (3 million acres) during the rainy season.