Mongabay features writer Gerry Flynn joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss a new investigation he published with freelance journalist Nehru Pry looking at how mining company Lin Vatey acquired thousands of hectares of a public forest, essentially kicking local people, including the Kuy Indigenous community, off public lands that they previously relied on. In this conversation, Flynn details how a once thriving community managed the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest and a robust ecotourism venture, which shut down when most of their land was given to 10 people with close ties to the government. “Ten individuals seemingly just reached out to the [Cambodian] government to ask if they could just have 3,064 hectares of land … much of which is in the community forest. Which is a pretty bizarre request, most normal people can’t just ask the government [for] that much land,” Flynn says. The 10 have connections to the Cambodian military and their families, Mongabay has found, and have begun clearing the forest inside the 3,000-hectare (7,400-acre) piece of formerly public land for a marble mine. Even though the land is supposed to be a community forest, according to an agreement signed by the Cambodian government, Flynn says this type of corporate land grab and subsequent extraction is quite common in the nation. “It’s very clear that the company is there to extract every kind of resource that they can from the community forest. As we see a lot in Cambodia, it’s public forests being turned into private fortunes.”…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Article by:
This story first appeared on Mongabay
South Africa Today – Environment
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
