Jungle Journey [with Chut Wutty]: Aoral Wildlife Sanctuary

April 7, 2012
Originally posted at: http://jamesstephens.me/jungle-journey-aoral-wildlife-sanctuary/

Slowly, Cambodia’s natural wonders are being chipped away by greed and stupidity.

I was fighting a head cold the day we triple-road a derelict motorbike into the mountains of Aoral Wildlife Sanctuary in Kampong Speu province. The man in charge is Chut Wutty, Director of Cambodia’s Natural Resources Protection Group. In a country where everyone can be bought this non-profit group of volunteers wind up as the sole defenders of a line drawn between protected land and unsustainable exploitation.

This chapter of my trip began by running into Keyla Bebe, a student working for the Pulitzer Centre on a story covering land use in Cambodia and the intertwined social activism scene. It took just a brief conversation to realize that an opportunity existed here to see things and meet people that are well off the beaten path. A few days later Keyla and I met Wutty in his idling 4×4 at the crack of dawn. With only two seatbelts it was time to get comfortable bouncing around in the back, high on cold medication and not exactly sure where we were going.

Just the odd tire puncture thrown in to make it interesting.

To understand where we were going I had to learn a few things about how land use works in Cambodia. An economic land concession (ELC) is an area that has been given to a developer for extractive resource use. The developer/investor is granted rights to remove the forest cover and plant crops and/or mine aggregate resources in exchange for protecting a small parcel of the ELC, providing local jobs, and of course, greasing the palms of politicians and law enforcement. Keep in mind I am simplifying things here for brevity’s sake; for a full and well written description of land use in Cambodia check out Keyla’s writing and photos here.

As we drove through the countryside we were treated to the typical Cambodian landscape; sprawling fields in various states of crop cover, sporadic palms and fruit trees, and a distinct lack of any real forest. The hours dragged on and the mountains were becoming visible in the distance when it was time to make our first stop; a small collection of families producing charcoal from the timber coming off the mountain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0AUfka7RoE

The grey dome structures are pits where the wood is ‘cooked’ into charcoal. The final product is then bundled up for export to the surrounding villages and distant cities where it is used as a cheap alternative to gas and oil. The irony of the situation, however, is that some of the timber being burned for charcoal is much more valuable if sold as lumber for construction.

Checking out the charcoal.

Local Communities in Cambodia Protest Logging

In the Aoral Wildlife Sanctuary, private companies such as HLH Agriculture are granted land concessions of up to 10,000 hectares for plantations. Image by Keyla Beebe. Cambodia, 2012.

April 20, 2012
Keyla Beebe, for the Pulitzer Center, Cambodia

“My life is important,” said Yin Chum, an activity leader with the Prey Lang Network (PLN) in Cambodia. “But the forest is my number one priority.”

Many villagers across Cambodia who share Chum’s attitude have created grassroots organizations such as PLN to protect the country’s quickly disappearing forests.

In March 2012 the Prey Lang Community Network coordinated a five-day operation to search the forest of Prey Lang for signs of illegal logging. Four hundred villagers from the four provinces surrounding Prey Lang forest in northeast Cambodia—Kampong Thom, Kratie, Stung Treng and Preah Vihea—traveled on foot and by motorbike for four days before meeting to patrol the forest.

“The villagers are here because they have lost confidence in the government,” said Wutty Chut, the slim and sharp-featured director of the National Resources Protection Group (NRPG), a local environment watchdog NGO.

During the first four days of their campaign, the villagers found and burned over 370 cubic meters of illegally cut timber. On March 28, 2012, over 30 police and military personnel confronted villagers as they demanded access to a government-sanctioned sawmill.

A Gaur (Khting) killed 1 in Kompong Speu

Villagers look at a wild gaur ("khting" in Khmer) in Kampot province (Photo: Neay Keb, Koh Santepheap newspaper)

Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Everyday.com.kh
Translated from Khmer by Socheata

In an unusual incident, a gaur went on rampage after five men who were collecting woods on top of the Phnom Thom Mountain, located in Oral district, Kompong Speu province, causing one dead and one seriously injured among the group of five. Koh Santepheap reported that the gaur went on a rampage after the men at around 10:00 AM on 26 August. The injured man and the other three men who survived, told the police that a large gaur was going after them, trying to gore them with its antlers, when the five men were resting after collecting woods and setting traps to catch wild animals. Those who climbed up the mountain and ventured into the deep forest were people who usually went in to collect woods and catching wild animals, sometimes they would catch wild boars or wild animals which are sometimes injured from the traps, and these animals would sometimes go after them to try to gore or hurt the humans. Gaurs are currently very rare in the Oral Mountain, and only under this circumstance, that the gaur involved in the incident – which may be injured by traps or shot at – became mad and went on a rampage and killed one man and injured another.