Residents and officials living around Phnom Penh’s canals say trash is quickly returning to waterways amid heavy rains, with at least one commune chief candidate promising to scrub the stench from garbage-clogged canals in his campaign.
Families in Stung Treng’s Sesan district are accusing an agriculture company of bulldozing the land they say they moved to after the Lower Sesan 2 Hydropower Dam flooded their land.
33 young activists rode bicycles around Boeng Tamok calling for a stop to the privatization and filling of the lake. For local residents, the youths were doing what they couldn’t dare to. “I’m happy to see it,” one said. “I want to see the young generation stand up to fight.”
Agriculture Minister Veng Sakhon assured animal welfare NGO Wildlife Alliance that an animal rescue center at Phnom Tamao will remain untouched, but did not address the potential destruction of hundreds of hectares of protected forest around it through the planned privatization of land.
Authorities stopped environmentalists investigating sewage flows into Phnom Penh rivers a year ago, jailing them for plotting. But black, foul-smelling discharges are continuing even as city officials said this week that they were unaware of a problem.
Early rains have damaged cashew crops and delayed the durian harvest, farmers say, as unseasonable weather patterns are restoring water reserves after recent years of drought but causing their own havoc.
Six sub-decrees signed in the span of a week privatized nearly 10,000 hectares across four provinces, with thousands of hectares going to unspecified families in northeastern provinces and a plot in Ream National Park adding to land tycoon Khun Sea’s property empire.
Reporters out on the Bassac river in a hired fishing boat counted 43 barges in total at various stages of the sand dredging process in two hours in one afternoon last week.
A senior Forestry Administration official told a wildlife NGO there was not much he could do about the future development and privatization of the Phnom Tamao protected forest, according to an account of the meeting provided by an NGO participant.
Monks and villagers say that a group of people purportedly hired by the military to cut down Kampong Speu’s Metta forest are continuing to destroy a densely forested area full of wildlife, and are now only about 200 meters from a pagoda inhabited by a nature-protecting monk.
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