Prominent Cambodian environmental and human rights activist Chut Wutty was shot dead on Wednesday.

He was killed in Koh Kong province, in the south-west of the country, while documenting the illegal logging that is decimating forests across the Mekong.

Wutty, who was 48 and founder of the Natural Resource Protection Group, led a lengthy and unbending campaign against the nexus of corrupt politicians, businesses, military and police that has wreaked havoc on Cambodia’s landscape and ridden roughshod over the rights of its impoverished people. He took on the Government’s policy of granting large Economic Land Concessions, which has driven deforestation and the forced evictions of thousands of families in the name of development.

Confronting these vested interests, and doing so publicly, was an act of incredible bravery; Wutty is not the first activist to be shot dead in Cambodia; he knew the risks he faced, and continued to stand up and speak for the poor, the displaced, and those without a voice.

The details of precisely how he was killed are unclear. What is known is that he had been in the forests of Koh Kong with two journalists from the Phnom Penh Post, documenting rosewood logging near a Chinese-built hydroelectric dam. He was apprehended by a military police officer on behalf of an unnamed company that wanted to stop him taking pictures.

A spokesman for the National Military Police told the Post: “All we know is that our military policeman was doing his duty and encountered this person and there was a gunfire.”

Both Wutty and a policeman were killed. The police have since claimed the policeman took his own life after shooting Wutty.

It’s hard to see how any sense of justice could emerge from the fallout of Wutty’s killing. Maybe the man who pulled the trigger is dead – maybe not. But who is really responsible for his death?

“Look at this story – and look at who will benefit from this killing,” says Sok Sam Oeu, the chairman of Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee.

Culpability for Wutty’s death lies at the door of these beneficiaries – the businessmen, politicians and officials making millions of dollars from environmental and human rights abuses.

In the months leading up to his death, Wutty had been involved in high-profile exposes of illegal rosewood logging and smuggling in protected areas. In doing so, he had taken on a deeply corrupt and violent trade whose tentacles spread across the Mekong. The increasingly rare rosewood species of the region have become so valuable that just one cubic meter can attract several thousand dollars in Cambodia or Thailand, rising to $50,000 by the time it reaches its target market in China.

Wutty wasn’t the first casualty of the rosewood trade this year. The shooting of Cambodian loggers crossing the border into Thailand in search of rosewood is now almost routine. The violence threatens to escalate, with Thailand increasingly bulking up the border with soldiers and no end to the stream of loggers willing to risk their lives for the returns available.

The deaths of more poor loggers will do nothing to stem the flow of rosewood and blood, or to honour Wutty’s legacy.

His killing lays down the gauntlet to the environmental and human rights community, globally, to ensure that the wrong people don’t benefit; to ensure that it doesn’t mean one less pair of eyes bearing witness to the human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of development but, instead, many more.

Read more about Wutty’s work in the Phnom Penh Post article Chut Wutty never stopped being a soldier.

Tom Johnson
Forests campaigner

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

More than 100 conservation activists from across four provinces are “worried” about a recent government sub-decree aimed at protecting Prey Lang forest, claiming the measure lacks broad input and will not prevent illegal logging in the area.

The representatives of the Prey Lang network, a group that advocates for the protection of the forest, met earlier this week to discuss a sub-decree establishing the Prey Lang forest as a conservation area.

Network member Seng Sok Heng said yesterday that the group “found some points that we don’t like, such as the fact that the Prey Lang communities were not invited to join discussions of the sub-decree, and some articles are unclear”.

The network also claimed the proposed conservation area excluded a large swath of land dense with rosewood trees, and therefore would not be effective in preventing illegal logging.

The advocates also took issue with the fact that the sub-decree prohibits villagers from collecting vines and roots from the forest.

Yem Sokhouy, a member of the Prey Lang network from Stung Treng province, said more than 10,000 residents from more than 300 villages earn a living from the forest by collecting such items for medicinal use.

Following the two-day meeting, the network sent a letter to Chan Sarun, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, outlining its feedback.

“We…demand three points from the ministry and the government: the government must include civil society and villagers in the discussion, it must stop providing land concessions in Prey Lang to private companies, and it must create a larger area of coverage,” Seng Sok Heng said.

“We are worried about this sub-decree,” he added.

MAFF Minister Chan Sarun could not be reached for comment yesterday.

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

The Kuy people of Cambodia are calling for international support to protect their threatened Prey Lang forest from illegal logging, agro-industrial development, and mining.

Mao Chanthoeun and hundreds of other Kuy villagers call themselves Cambodia's "avatars." Like the Na'vi people in the "Avatar" film, the Kuy are defending their forest against mining and other destructive practices. Photo by Samrang Pring, Reuters.

In Cambodia, some 200,000 mostly Indigenous Kuy villagers are desperately trying to preventthe destruction of Prey Lang (“Our Forest”), the last large primary forest of its kind on the Indochina peninsula. Generations of Kuy people have protected the forest with its sacred areas, places for gathering fruits, medicinal plants, housing materials, and resin. Some 300 villages and family rice fields are scattered through a large buffer zone of secondary forest that surrounds Prey Lang. Their use of forest resources is sustainable, but now their livelihoods and the life of the forest are under attack.

Sunrise and off to work the land and Prey Lang forest Pic:Mouth to Source

The government has issued a dizzying patchwork of land concessions to road builders, mining companies, and agro-industries. Bulldozers are slicing huge swaths through the forest, clear-cutting enormous blocks of land for rubber and other plantations. Studies show that Indigenous forest-dwelling communities do the best job of protecting forests. Our best bet for saving Prey Lang is to support the Kuy people’s rights and their management of the forest they know best.

Old forest road in Prey Lang Forest Pic: Mouth to Source

Join us:

Global Response, the action program of Cultural Survival, and EarthAction, a global network of over 2,000 organizations, are working together in support of the Prey Lang Community Network to protect and save their forest. On our websites below you can find links to communicate with Cambodian officials to urge them to cancel existing land concessions and create a sustainable management program with the permanent participation of the Prey Lang peoples. We ask your organization to please share this information widely, with other organizations, with your members, and in your newsletters.

How You Can Help:

Below is a sign-on letter for organizations, available in PDF here. Please add your organization, and help the Kuy people protect the unique and threatened Prey Lang forest. To sign on, please email Danielle@cs.org by February 5 and include the name of the signee, organization, and country you are based in.

For more information and online action pages, please see visit:

Cultural Survival, EarthAction, and Prey Lang Community Network.

Sincere thanks and good wishes to you in your important work for our planet and all its peoples.

Paula Palmer, Director Lois Barber, Director
Global Response Program EarthAction Network
Cultural Survival, Inc. PO Box 63
PO Box 7490 Amherst, MA 01004
Boulder CO 80306 USA Tel +413 549 8118
Tel +303/444-0306

_____________________________________________________________

Dear Ambassador Kosal Sea, Prime Minister Samech Hun Sen,

Respectfully,
(list of organizations)
_____________________________________________________________

Does the Kuy people’s situation sound familiar?

If your organization represents or partners with Indigenous communities that are struggling to prevent environmental destruction and defend their rights, learn how to request a Global Response Campaign here.

If you’d like more information about becoming a Partner Organization in the EarthAction Network and receiving action alerts on global environment, development, peace and human rights issues, click here to JOIN EarthAction.

Cultural Survival’s Global Response Program organizes effective international letter-writing campaigns to protect the environment and the rights of indigenous peoples. See action alerts for adults and youth at www.cs.org

EarthAction organizes effective letter-writing campaigns on critically important environment, peace, and human rights issues. Learn more at EarthAction.org

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

A new imaging system that uses a suite of airborne sensors is capable of providing detailed, three-dimensional pictures of tropical forests — including the species they contain and the amount of CO2 they store — at astonishing speed. These advances could play a key role in preserving the world’s beleaguered rainforests.

This summer, high above the Amazon rainforest in Peru, a team of scientists and technicians conducted an ambitious experiment using a pioneering technology. Deploying a pair of sweeping lasers that sent 400,000 pulses per second toward the ground, as well as an imaging spectrometer that could detect the chemical and light-reflecting properties of individual plants and trees 7,000 feet below, the researchers were able to instantaneously gather a vast amount of information about the unexplored tracts of cloud forest that passed beneath their airplane.

Conceived by Greg Asner, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, the new system — known as AToMS, or the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System — has the potential to transform how tropical forest research is conducted. By combining several breakthrough technologies, Asner and his colleagues can capture detailed images of individual trees at a rate of 500,000 or more per minute, enabling them to create a high-resolution, three-dimensional map of the physical structure of the forest, as well as its chemical and optical properties. In Peru, the scientists hoped to not only determine what tree species lay below, but also to gauge how the ecosystem was responding to last year’s drought — the worst ever recorded in the Amazon — as well as help Peru develop a better mechanism for monitoring deforestation and degradation.

Asner’s new system, a significant advance on the so-called Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) that he originally developed in 2006, could also play a vital role in global forestry in the decades ahead. The technology could help alleviate uncertainty about carbon emissions from deforestation and different forms of forest management, both of which are critical to the emerging policy of REDD (Reducing Emissions form Deforestation and Forest Degradation), a UN program that aims to compensate tropical countries for preserving their forests.

“The whole idea was to measure each of the things plant ecologists measure on the ground to evaluate biodiversity,” said Asner, as he flew over the Amazonian cloud forest. Asner is now helping the National Science Foundation develop an airplane with this suite of monitoring technologies, and is in talks with NASA about equipping a satellite with the system.

One of the key technologies Asner uses is known as LiDAR, which employs two powerful lasers to blast through canopy vegetation, reach the forest floor, and return a wealth of information about the forest’s structure. Depending on the aircraft’s altitude, sensors can map the forest at resolutions ranging from 10 centimeters to one meter, fine enough to “see” understory shrubs and epiphytes in tree crowns. LiDAR is also very good for measuring above ground biomass, or the amount of carbon stored in a forest’s vegetation. It can also detect surface elevations to identify watersheds and waterways.

To truly understand an ecosystem, however, scientists need to know more about its characteristics, including aspects that can’t be been with the naked eye. This is where Asner’s CAO really sets itself apart, using newly developed sensors — built by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — that can detect dozens of signals, including photosynthetic pigment concentrations, water content of leaves, defense compounds like phenols, structural compounds such as lignin and cellulose, as well as phosphorous and other micronutrients — all of which can be used to build signatures to distinguish individual plant species, as well as other measures of forest condition. The result, using the so-called VSWIR Imaging Spectrometer, is a system that can map the chemical and spectral attributes of a forest that may have more than 200 species of trees in a single hectare.

“When leaves interact with sunlight, the compounds bend, stretch, and vibrate at different patterns and rates,” said Asner. “These different rates led to different scattering of light. The spectrometer picks up on this and we’ve been able to deduce chemicals from these signatures.”

But for the CAO to accurately assess biodiversity, Asner’s team has to first do the groundwork by creating a database of the chemical and spectral properties of various plants, which are then fed into the CAO’s library of information on individual plant species. These are then correlated with the data collected by the CAO’s various sensors. In the Amazon, Asner and his team conducted extensive, on-the-ground work to compile information on nearly 5,000 plant species. “We have the best team of tree climbers in the world,” said Asner. “They can climb 75 trees a day, conducting full sampling.”

The aircraft that carries the system allows Asner’s team to map very large areas, sometimes more than 49,000 hectares (120,000 acres) a day. In 2009, using an older, less sophisticated version of the system, Asner mapped 4.3 million hectares of Peru’s Madre de Dios region. Now he is working on a bigger scale: nearly the entire Peruvian Amazon. After this, he goes to Colombia and Panama.

“We’re looking at biodiversity in regions that have never been put down on the science map,” said Asner.

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About the author:Rhett Butler is the founder and editor of Mongabay.com, one of the leading sites on the Web covering tropical forests and biodiversity.

Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

South-East Asia has suffered the greatest losses of biodiversity of any tropical region in the world over the past 50 years, according to new research involving the University of Adelaide.

Researchers found that South-East Asia has the lowest remaining forest cover, highest rates of deforestation, and the highest human population densities among all of the major tropical regions.

The study, published today in the journal Nature, highlights the importance of natural forests undisturbed by humans – known as ‘primary forests’ – in sustaining tropical wildlife.

“The study compares human impacts on biodiversity across the world’s key tropical forested regions, and the conclusion is very clear: undisturbed primary forests are the only ones in which a full complement of species can thrive,” says Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling with the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute and one of the co-authors of the study.

“Much has been made in recent years of the potential conservation value of disturbed and degraded forests – what we call ‘secondary forests’,” says co-author Professor Barry Brook, also of the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute.

“Until now, some have believed that revegetation and other conservation programs in these secondary forests will be enough to help preserve or bring back the majority of species. However, this study shows that the impact of human interference in those forests is too strong. We’re kidding ourselves if we think the damage can be reversed,” he says.

“It’s not that secondary forests have no biodiversity value, they are just less valuable than primary forests,” Professor Bradshaw says. “We should be focused on protecting primary forests as much as possible.”

One of the leaders of the study, PhD student Luke Gibson from the National University of Singapore, says: “There’s no substitute for primary forests. Our comprehensive assessment shows that all major forms of disturbance, with one possible exception, invariably reduce biodiversity in tropical forests.”

That exception is selective logging, which had a relatively small – but still negative – impact on biodiversity.

The other leader of the study is PhD student Tien Ming Lee from the University of California, San Diego, who says South-East Asia “consistently emerged as a conservation hotspot and must be one of our top priority regions”. “This does not mean, however, that we can ignore other regions,” he says.

To protect the world’s remaining primary tropical forests, the authors suggest a number of strategies, including the expansion and enhanced enforcement of protected areas.

“We have already invested substantially in setting up parks, so expanding them and making them more effective might be practical,” says Tien Ming Lee.

The co-authors include researchers from Singapore, Australia, the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

Via Yale Environment 360

For the last 10 years, researcher Erik Patel has focused on the plight of the silky sifaka lemur, an endangered primate whose forest habitat in a remote corner of Madagascar is being cleared by rampant illegal logging. Now a new video, Trouble in Lemur Land — shot in Madagasgar’s Marojejy National Park and Masoala National Park — features Patel and captures scenes of the rare lemur in the mountainous habitat that has kept it safe for thousands of years and of the logging operations that are feeding a robust market for rosewood, ebony, and pallisandre. According to scientists, as few as 300 of these lemurs remain — none outside this remote region. “Huge risks were taken to get this logging footage,” says Patel. “This is a dangerous topic to investigate, but we had to take a stand.”

Trouble in Lemur Land from Erik R Patel on Vimeo.

Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

Above the hum of wood sanders and electric saws, conversations in Vietnamese, Chinese, Khmer and Bonong can be heard in a factory producing furniture made from illegally felled trees.

The Vietnamese-owned business lies in a remote Mondulkiri village and deals exclusively in exotic timber: beng, th’nong, and two types of rosewood. These rare trees are protected by Cambodian law, Forestry Administration officials say, yet the Vietnamese owner says her factory has produced and marketed luxury furniture without interference for about a year.

The factory owner said she buys wood from loggers who work mainly at night. Some furniture from her shop, which she operates with her Chinese husband, appears in storefronts in Vietnam, but most of it is sold to shops in the provincial town of Sen Monorom in Keo Seima district.

Business appears to be thriving. Blocks of precious timber are stacked beside unpolished tables and bed frames. Fresh wood shavings scent the dusty outdoor workspace. Several Cambodian and Bonong carpenters chisel meticulous designs into rosewood benches that the owner says will sell for upwards of US$500.

“The police and the army don’t give us problems. We are a small business. We are far away from people,” she explained.

Removed from the nearest town by a four-hour motorcycle ride through rivers, dry creek beds and swathes of mud, her operation is far from the reaches of authorities – which experts believe are failing to stem the illegal wood trade.

During the past four years, Cambodia has seen drastic decreases in rare species of trees due to illegal logging, community research from the National Resource Protection Group indicates. In 2008, the Kingdom retained more than 30 percent of its pre-Khmer Rouge luxury wood resources, Chut Wutty, the group’s director, said. Today, that number has fallen to a staggering 3 percent in Mondulkiri, Ratanakkiri, Preah Vihear and four other heavily forested provinces.

“The situation is getting worse and worse. In some places, all of these kinds of trees have been cut down,” he said.

Cambodia’s Forestry Administration is responsible for the regulation of illegal logging. Yet the vastness of the Kingdom’s forests greatly limits its protection efforts, David Emmett, regional director of Conservation International’s Greater Mekong programs, said. “It is next to impossible for the Forestry Administration to have people visiting every remote village. The main issue then comes down to the implementation of forestry law by local police,” Emmett said, adding that Conservation International has not seen the same level of deforestation reported by the NRPG because it operates only in protected forests. The NRPG is active in protected and non-protected areas.

Song Kheang, Forestry Administration director in Mondulkiri, said that although his department has banned furniture factories from doing business in the province, the illegal logging industry continues to grow. Criminal networks that move timber are increasingly sophisticated. Loggers evade administration efforts with new greater cunning, such as transporting timber in luxury vehicles as opposed to traditional logging trucks, he said.

Rampant corruption could account for many of the shortcomings in police enforcement. Bribes taken by local police and forestry officials – a much sought after source of income – stymies the already scant level of regulation, Chut Wutty said.

“[Officials] get two salaries: one from the government, one from the shops that sell the wood,” he said, adding that border police will receive bribes for as much a $1,000 per cubic meter of timber as it crosses into Vietnam. Middlemen, who acquire a cubic meter from wood cutters for about $1,000, sell to Vietnamese buyers often for more than $7,000, he said.

More than 85 percent of Cambodia’s illegally felled timber is sold into Vietnam or Thailand, Chut Wutty said. The remaining 15 percent is sold domestically in the Kingdom’s more than 2,000 furniture shops, he said.

In Phnom Penh’s Chamkarmon district, Ung Sothearith sells luxury wood products for thousands of dollars at his furniture store. Customers in the capital pay $4,000 to $5,000 for a finely polished four-piece bench-and-table set made of beng, he said.

Demand for beng has increased in tandem with Cambodia’s rapidly multiplying hotels, mansions and office boardrooms, Berry Mulligan, Cambodia program manager at Fauna and Flora International, said.

The timber, known for its flame-like hue, is considered one of the world’s most threatened trees by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “The demand for beng and rosewood timber far exceeds the supply and will wipe out these species unless stronger protection measures are put in place in the forest,” he said.

Ung Sothearith said his store buys pre-made furniture from Ratanakkiri and Preah Vihear provinces, and maintains that his sales are legal as long as the shop doesn’t make the furniture.

Laws regulating luxury wood sales are complex. Mondulkiri Forestry Administration director Song Kheang said such furniture sales were legal as long as the wood was purchased via government auction of confiscated timber. For consumers, no method of determining the legality of Cambodia’s luxury furniture exists because no certification system is in place, Emmett said.

Further complication arises from the origin of the wood.

In 2010, a government decree allowed for the cutting of flora in flood plains produced by newly built dams, Chut Wutty said. Although rare tree species grow in the Kingdom’s highlands, far from flood plains in river basins, the announcement gave rise to a slew of illicit felling.

Loggers can simply claim the timber was cut in a dammed area in Kampot and Pursat provinces, he said. “The decree is a contradiction of all the laws from the past,” Chut Wutty said. Vague logging regulations such as these continue to challenge countries with depleting forest reserves.

A lack of clarity and consistency between land and forest laws, as well as between national and local laws, often give rise to illegal logging and land disputes worldwide, said Alison Hoare, a senior researcher fellow with the Energy, Environment and Research Programme at Chatham House in London.

If continued unabated, illegal logging threatens to wholly deplete Cambodia’s rare tree species, Chut Wutty said. Once the region’s most florally intact country, several species face extinction. The loss of one tree species can cause an unhealthy chain reaction throughout the environment as a whole, Mulligan said. “Removal of one species may not have an immediate effect on the entire ecosystem but contributes to the gradual unravelling of ecological relationships that have evolved and stabilised over millennia,” he said.

The damage is not yet irreversible and incentives for leaving Cambodia’s rare trees standing are increasing, Mulligan said. The value of forest carbon projects, which mitigate climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide, may one day compete with logging revenues. Future funding for carbon stock projects will rely on intact high-biomass trees such beng and offer potential revenue sources for forest communities and the government, Mulligan said.

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

For the second time in less than a month, a human rights training event in Cambodia has been disrupted by men carrying AK-47s, reports the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights.

Village, commune and district authorities, together with police armed with AK­47s, disrupted a human rights training event on 7 September. The event was organised by the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights (CCHR) and the Natural Resources Protection Group (NRPG) in Mean Rith commune, Sandan district, Kampong Thom Province. Those involved in the disruption threatened to arrest the organixers[sic] if the event proceeded. It was the second such disruption in a month.

While no arrests were made, officials and police photographed individuals seeking to participate in the event. The involved in the event were community members affected by the ongoing destruction of Prey Lang forest or other land conflicts as well as event organisers and observers.

The training event was the first to be held by the CCHR and the NRPG following a media report in The Cambodia Daily on 6 September. The report quoted Kampong Thom provincial police chief Phan Sopheng as accusing the two groups of inciting people through the provision of human rights training. He threatened to seek the suspension of both groups if further training events were conducted.

On 6 September, the chief monk at Wat Kiribotaram, under pressure from commune and district level officials, withdrew the permission he previously granted to both groups for the use of the pagod [sic]. The groups were supposed to hold a training event on 8 September in Dang Kambith commune for another community affected by the destruction of Prey Lang.

This morning at 8.30am, staff from CCHR and NRPG arrived in Mean Rith commune to prepare the venue for today’s training event. The training was organised in response to information from community members that deforestation activities in the area had increased of late.

In total, 34 participants registered to take part in the training although organisers were informed by participants that others had been stopped from traveling to take part in the event. Shortly after the venue was prepared, officials and police arrived and informed CCHR and NRPG that, if they were to proceed with the event, they would be arrested.

Commune and district officials stated that the organisers had failed to provide adequate notice of the event. But the Law on Peaceful Demonstrations provides that no such notice is required for “education dissemination activities” including training events. The organisers had nevertheless informed the provincial authorities of the event in writing.

Under the direction of deputy governor of Sandan district, Div Hok, police photographed all participants who had registered for the event as well as the organisers and observers from The Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights (LICADHO) and The Community Legal Education Center (CLEC).

Div Hok requested that the organisers provide the identity cards of all participants and observers. This request was denied. After a two hour stand-off between the authorities and the organisers, the event was eventually allowed to proceed following a discussion with Sandan district council member Uch Bunhy.

In response to the intervention of officials and armed police, Ou Virak, President of CCHR, commented:

For the second time in less than a month, a human rights training event organised by CCHR and NRPG has been disrupted by men carrying AK-47s. Again, the authorities have claimed that CCHR and NRPG have failed to satisfy notification requirements that simply do not exist. To see the authorities resort to these kinds of tactics against ordinary citizens who simply want to inform themselves of their rights under Cambodian and international law is nothing short of shocking.

Nevertheless, what I will remember most from today is not the school yard bully-boy tactics deployed by the authorities; rather it is the defiance of the participants – ordinary people motivated by their desire to inform themselves of their human rights under Cambodian and international law facing down armed police.

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

Cambodia’s woodlands are seeing continued deforestation, despite a plan by the government to curb illegal logging, environmental groups say.

Authorities say they have a plan to protect the forest, but non-governmental groups say the problem persists, including through an increase in land concessions, and massive illegal logging by the military.

Cambodia has an official strategy to protect the forests over the next 18 years, including land management practices and tighter governmental controls over still exiting forests. Experts say as little as 30 percent of the country’s forest cover remains, while logging continues to be a problem.

George Boden, a deforestation expert for Global Witness, which was ejected from Cambodia in 2005 after detailed reporting on corruption and illegal logging, said the practice has continued.

Officials close to Prime Minister Hun Sen have sold off forests for their own benefit in an ongoing practice, he said. Global Witness reported in 2007 that a kleptocratic elite continued to earn riches by selling off forestland.

However, Than Sarath, a management official at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, said the government has six programs to protect the forests. Part of that includes putting money that forests earn back into their own protection, he said. There are also plans to sell carbon credits, he said.

However, villagers remain unconvinced.

Svay Poun, 50, a villager in Preah Vihear province’s Roveng district, said he was dubious of government efforts, following a series of concessions in Prey Lang forest, a vast stretch of woodlands that spans four provinces in east and north of the country.

Villagers there say their livelihoods have been threatened by rubber plantation concessions to companies that have not followed regulations to protect the forest.

“A plantation is not the same as a forest,” said villager Chun Yin, who lives in Kampong Thom province. “As we see it, when will the trees grow again? It doesn’t have animals, fruit or vegetables, or growth from the old generations.”

Demand for Cambodia’s high-quality timber comes from China and Vietnam, according to environmental experts.
Chut Vuthy, president of the Natural Resource Conservation Group, said timber must either be transported by road, or shipped.

That means it has to cross checkpoints.

For Vietnam, the Doung checkpoint in Kampong Cham province sees up to 12 trucks a day cross with illegal timber, he said, while ships to China leave from ports in Koh Kong and Preah Sihanouk provinces. The Cardamom Mountains remain a main source of such timber, experts said, especially in Pursat province.

Than Sarath said legal logging revenue was part of the national budget, but he declined to confirm the amount.

Along the Thai border, meanwhile, illegal logging has increased since tensions escalated between Thailand and Cambodia over Preah Vihear temple in 2008, villagers say.

A former truck driver, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he drove trucks for top military officials in the province, as well as members of Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit.

Valuable timber is cut from the forest and stored at military headquarters in the province, he said. No one is allowed to enter the compound because of national security, he said.

Every month, he said, military officers issue orders to lower ranking soldiers to cut trees in the jungle.

“After they cut the trees, they transport them to the military headquarters, about 20 kilometers from Preah Vihear,” he said. From there they are shipped to Kampong Cham and Vietnam, he said.

A villager in Preah Vihear province, who asked not to be named, said the practice continues. He counts four or five trucks a night. Trucks go up carrying soldiers and come down carrying timber covered up with tarpaulin, he said.

“The relevant authorities are afraid to stop those trucks, because they fear losing their positions,” he said.

Chut Vuthy said five to six major smuggling operations are still underway in the country.

“We have all kinds of laws to protect natural resources, but from day to day, the forest is still decreasing,” he said.

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source

One of Cambodia’s senior-most monks has ordered pagodas across the country to deny customary hospitality to a low-level monk who has participated in land protests in Siem Reap province and Phnom Penh.

In an April 26 directive, Non Ngeth, the supreme patriarch of the Maha Nikaya branch of Cambodian Buddhism, said pagodas are no longer permitted to host 30-year-old monk Loun Savath.

In justifying the ban, Non Ngeth said the younger monk’s active participation in land protests are counter to the teachings of Buddha and could lead villagers to think ill of the religion in general.

Loun Savath, who comes from Siem Reap’s Chikreng district, had been supporting villagers there in a long-running land dispute. He recently relocated to Phnom Penh’s Wat Ounalom pagoda, from where he joined protests in the capital by disgruntled residents of the Boeung Kak lake development and by villagers against private concessions in Prey Lang forest.

“He has been involved in politics,” Non Ngeth wrote of Loun Savath. “He joined protests with villagers and has gone everywhere with human rights activists, which is an abuse of Buddha’s rules.”

“If you want to be a politician,” he continued, “take a shovel and dig a ditch for people; don’t join protests.”

Loun Savath, who has since fled Phnom Penh and is back in Chikreang district, told VOA Khmer by phone his actions had not gone against the will of Buddha.

“What I have done is in the name of Cambodian citizens to help social affairs,” he said. “Monks must help people who have problems.”

Ou Virak, director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said Non Ngeth’s letter was its own political abuse of Buddhism, which does not prohibit social activism.

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Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future - from Mouth to Source