Northeast Cambodia and Virachey

Hi Mangoholic, nice to hear from you again. Let me ask you for an honest opinion. Do you really think flora and fauna preservation of any kind, nature or type holds any hope in this province where the govt. is given to wholesale concessions to foreign companies and then stashing the corruption money in their pockets, band accounts or girlfriend's bra?

I know it's tough to be optimistic, and believe me I have seen a lot of forest destruction in the province. But there is a new chief of the Ministry of Environment, a Khmer guy who is from Australia and has a PhD from there. He seems to genuinely care about what is going on there, and he has taken an interest in Ratanakiri. A French man who has been visiting R'kiri for years (like me), wrote to me recently saying that he can hardly believe it but the talk he is hearing from his anthropological informants there is that there is a chance that conservation is going to be taken seriously. Much or most of the illegal logging happening there, which you can read about in today's Phnom Penh Post, is actually selective logging for specific trees. Loggers can get a lot of money for those trees and from what I gather many people aren't even bothering with hunting anymore -they're just trying to get those valuable trees before someone else gets them.

Now when you travel up to Ban Lung the view on both sides of the highway is horrific. Just burning stump forests everywhere. Sections of Virachey along the Vietnamese border have been hammered, and several large pots were cleared to for rubber plantations. However, some of the concessions seem to be inactive (up to 80%, from what I gather; maybe they just wanted the exclusive right to go in and get the best trees), and the Park might be able to get them back. Lomphat Wildlife Sanctuary has been hit really hard -worse than Virachey because it's mostly on flat land and too easy to move around in.

So that leaves Virachey and the Voen Sai-Siem Pang Protected Forest (where Gibbon Spotting Cambodia and other ecotourism projects operate in). It's not too late for these 2 places, and they're are magical. The province needs tourists -give the locals some confidence in the concept of ecotourism, help provide the political capital to save those areas.

The Ministry of Tourism has also invited me to host a workshop on the potential for ecotourism in Northeast Cambodia, and I'll be doing that in Phnom Penh later this month. Supposedly there should be some policymakers in attendance.

I don't know if that answers your question. What I can say right now is that I hope the degradation centers mainly on selective logging and that large scale forest clearing does not occur in the protected areas. We can see from our short term camera-trap results that there are still plenty of wild animals in Virachey, so the place is worth saving (to say nothing of the ecosystem services that it provides). By the way, there will be another camera-trap check soon, and I hope to be reporting back with some exciting info.

Cheers!

Thanks for all that information Manoholic2 and I hope you are right. I've seen little in the way for respect of rural land in the province where I live. We of course, have no logging locally, but there is plenty of evidence of stored illegal logs and huge pieces in our village kept there by middlemen. As for the new Minister of Environment; it doesn't much matter what he believes, but how much power he has. In fact, I am cynical enough to believe that he was deliberately chosen by the govt. to make it look as if they really care. I doubt that he is high on that scale of power with oh say, Try Pheap. So, keep your love of nature intact, but watch yourself; Cambodia does not need a foreign Chut Vuthy. So, after living here for a long time, I cannot share your qualified optimism. Money is the new Buddha, in fact it has been for a while and I see no future for this country in terms of democracy or upward mobility for the impoverished and have much less hope for an enlightened environmental policy. Again, I thank you for your lengthy reply and not only do I hope you are right; I hope I am wrong.

I understand your cynicism and sometiemes I feel it too. Perhaps all we are doing with our project is documenting the wildlife that remained in the early part of the 21st Century, the twilight years of Indochina's natural heritage. Maybe that's what it will turn into. I try not to stick my neck out too far in terms of criticism because I certainly do not want to become a foreign Chut Wutty. In fact, I urge my Khmer friends to be very cautious in their criticism as well.