Efforts to save Cambodia’s coast tread water as fish stocks plummet

This is the third part of a Mongabay series about challenges faced by Cambodia’s small-scale fishers along the coast. Read Part One and Part Two.

KOH RONG ISLAND, Cambodia — The afternoon sun beat down on the azure sea off the coast of Koh Rong, the largest island in Cambodia’s first marine national park in the southwestern province of Preah Sihanouk.

Mangrove forests skirted by lazily as Dy Chantha left Prek Svay, one of the island’s fishing villages, to patrol the waters of the community fishery, or CFi, off the northern tip of Koh Rong with a team of five other CFi officers in March 2024.

But the CFi speedboat could scarcely hold the five CFi officers, so Chantha, the group’s leader, took Mongabay reporters in his own fishing boat, following the CFi speedboat on its afternoon patrol of the 7,600-hectare (18,800-acre) community fishing grounds.

“If trawlers come inside the [CFi] boundary, it has a big impact, such as destroying the fish sanctuaries, the eggs, the turtle sanctuaries and seagrass,” Chantha said.

Trawlers are the main threat that Chantha and the CFi team are tasked with monitoring inside their section of the national park. Because they’re civilians, they’re not authorized to make arrests or seize illicit catches. What they can do is report illegal fishing activity — such as trawling inside the marine national park or CFi— to the Fisheries Administration and the Ministry of Environment, who jointly manage the area.

But the patrol boats had barely made it 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from Prek Svay when Chantha said it was time to turn back. They’d only covered a tiny fraction of the CFi’s designated waters, which extend 7.5 km (4.7 mi) out from Prek Svay. There was little appetite among the CFi patrol team to actively seek out illegal trawlers, which drop drag nets sometimes hundreds of meters wide into the water, killing everything they catch.

“We used to go to the edge of the CFi boundary, but today is just a short patrol,” Chantha said, declining to answer whether he thought such a patrol was effective at protecting the island’s marine resources.

Chantha said he didn’t know where the trawlers came from or who owned them, and insisted that trawlers rarely entered either Koh Rong Marine National Park or the Prek Svay CFi, even though there were no markers to warn vessels of the boundaries.

When Mongabay showed Chantha satellite data of trawlers operating within the national park, he conceded that the park has “not worked” to prevent illegal trawling, primarily due to a lack of resources. This problem is shared by the Prek Svay CFi, he pointed out.

“We, the community fishery, have a small patrol boat,” he said. “We do not have the capacity to go out further away. We can only go a few kilometers from the shore, but the Fisheries Administration should patrol the outer waters.”

Similarly, when asked why the patrols were conducted during the day when by all accounts trawling, whether legal or otherwise, happens mostly at night, Chantha pretended not to hear the question.

“These days we don’t patrol at night,” he eventually said after being asked repeatedly.

These patrols happen three or four times a month and are local fishers’ last line of defense against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing operations that have ravaged Cambodia’s marine fish stocks, resulting in precipitous drops in livelihoods and widespread ecological damage. Yet as poorly defended as Koh Rong appears, it’s Cambodia’s oldest and most celebrated marine protected area and it theoretically enjoys the highest level of protection the government confers upon marine fishing grounds.

Both the government’s capacity for and will to counter fisheries problems are minimal, and as one multimillion-dollar project to bolster them comes to an end, another is just kicking off. Whether these efforts to salvage Cambodia’s coastal resources will pay off depends on a range of factors and actors, but so far the plans implemented haven’t been enough to stave off the impending collapse of marine fish stocks.

Out of stock and under pressure

Across the coast of Cambodia, fishing communities are losing out to IUU fishing, which mostly takes the form of domestic and foreign trawlers operating in prohibited or protected waters. Research by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) found that the majority of Cambodian coastal fishers reported an average decline in income of nearly 50% between 2019 and 2022. Local fishers’ catches dropped precipitously, by as much as 60% between 2017 and 2022, which tracks research showing that Cambodian and Thai fish stocks in 2018 amounted to just 10% of their levels in 1970, according to the ADB.

Compounding this, the elite capture of more than half of Cambodia’s 435-kilometer (270-mile) shoreline property, as well as scores of islands, has forced small-scale fishers from their coastal lands even as trawlers muscle them out of the water. While Cambodia’s coastal communities reportedly endure poverty rates double the national average, some unknown entities are getting rich from IUU fishing in Cambodia. A 2020 report by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries estimated as much as 37,500 metric tons of fish, valued at $56 million, were caught illegally each year.

The report says overfishing by national and foreign vessels “has [led] to increased illegal activities that have not been controlled because of weak monitoring, control and surveillance.”

Assessments found that between 30% and 80% of Cambodia’s marine fisheries exports are smuggled into Vietnam and Thailand via traders at sea who bypass official trade ports. Government data show 544 fisheries crimes recorded across coastal provinces in the first five months of 2024, up from just 131 in the whole of 2023. Nearly 75% of the 544 crimes recorded this year were linked to trawlers, but there’s no indication as to who or how many people were prosecuted.

The scale of IUU fishing in Cambodian waters is difficult to determine with any precision due to a lack of data, although within Koh Rong Marine National Park, both historical and more recent research have highlighted the prevalence of fisheries crimes.

“Quantifying illegality, generally, is a brutal thing,” said Ian Urbina, director and founder of the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism outfit that investigates lawlessness across the world’s oceans. “This is especially opaque because it’s offshore.”

According to Urbina, roughly one in five fish is caught through IUU fishing, although he noted that this statistic likely doesn’t transfer globally, and in Cambodia is likely higher.

“Not because there are more bad actors, but because there’s less cops, there’s less governance, less police and therefore more market incentive, you’re likely to get away with it and [there’s] more desperation, it’s a poorer country and everyone’s hustling to make ends meet,” he said.

Undermining the solutions trialed along Cambodia’s coast is the long-running problem of corruption. While prevalent in fisheries the world over, corruption remains stubbornly unaddressed in Cambodia and was repeatedly named as one of the reasons communities felt IUU fishing goes unaddressed by authorities. Many along the coast suspected unnamed powerful interests pay off the Fisheries Administration.

But it wasn’t just high-level corruption that communities reported; Mongabay reporters were told of bribes paid to low-ranking officers and even to CFis to enable illegal fishing.

Across Koh Kong and Preah Sihanouk provinces, many fishers were afraid to even speak about IUU fishing for fear of retribution from authorities and the trawler operators who they feared might be connected.

“We know it’s not good to talk too much or too honestly in this society,” said one anonymous community member, who complained of corruption within the Fisheries Administration to Mongabay by the main port in Thma Sa commune in Koh Kong province. “Where we live, we should maintain happiness. It’s normal that after we speak from our mouth then it goes to someone’s ears, so we continue to live in happiness [of] peace until we die.”

Patrolling a paper park

One key mechanism for fixing Cambodia’s marine fisheries is marine protected areas, which have been touted globally as a solution to dwindling fish catches and degraded ecosystems.

The Aichi Biodiversity Targets advised Cambodia to create more marine protected areas, but instead the government has sold off key coastal ecosystems, including areas are where the majority of the country’s marine-sediment carbon is stored. So far, Cambodia has protected 1.4% of its waters, but just 0.5% of that area has completed management effectiveness evaluations, and protection has done little to prevent the continued destruction of life under the sea.

Established in 2018, Koh Rong Marine National Park extends protection — on paper at least — across 47,137 hectares (116,478 acres) of water, as well as 5,361 hectares (13,247 acres) of terrestrial landscapes across seven islands. But while the park has been under the Ministry of Environment’s jurisdiction for more than six years, it still hasn’t been formally zoned, so the rules laid out under the 2016 marine fisheries management area (MFMA) that preceded the park still apply. These include six zonation types that restrict fishing activities: all of them ban trawling, while two ban all fishing activity. Only small-scale fishing is allowed across the majority of Koh Rong Marine National Park.

The 2016 introduction of the MFMA was heralded as a huge step forward in Cambodia. An assessment of its success four years afterward by Fauna & Flora, the NGO leading marine conservation in Koh Kong and Preah Sihanouk provinces, found increases in fish abundance and diversity, as well as in hard coral coverage, and noted that the “lack of further decline in these crucial indicators is a positive sign for the current marine management initiatives deployed throughout the archipelago.”

But this was tempered by Fauna & Flora noting that the Koh Rong MFMA “has yet to positively influence many metrics typically used to assess coral reef ecosystem health,” and “it is imperative for the Royal Government of Cambodia to enact more stringent enforcement and management strategies within the Koh Rong [Marine National Park].”

Even though Koh Rong Marine National Park is supposedly under the Ministry of Environment’s jurisdiction, Chantha said the ministry has no ranger presence on the water. “I’ve never seen them conducting patrols on the ocean,” he said. “I often see them on the land.”

Neither Eang Sophalleth, the environment minister, nor Khvay Atitya, a spokesperson for the ministry, responded to multiple requests for comment.

In practice, the CFis are one of the park’s chief means of protection as they are, in principle, run by local communities who have a stake in maintaining fish stocks off the island’s shores.

Chantha noted that when the Prek Svay CFi started in 2003, almost everyone in the village relied on fishing for an income, so they all had a stake in maintaining the CFi. But then the tourism industry began to boom, luring many away from an increasingly precarious life at sea, and today only 30% of the population are fishers, according to Chantha. As the buy-in from local communities has dropped off, so too has their ability to defend the waters against criminality.

This sentiment, that CFis need more resources to make Koh Rong Marine National Park function in reality and not just on paper, was echoed in Daem Thkov village, home to another CFi on the east of the island.

“Illegal trawlers secretly enter the protected areas when our patrol team has already returned home,” said Pel Ra, the deputy CFi leader, adding that the trawlers regularly threaten the patrols. “At night, we dare not stop them or go close because they are not afraid of us. Their waves alone will sink our boat. We are scared, really scared. This is a huge challenge for us.”

Ra echoed the lack of support from the Environment Ministry, saying he’s never seen a ministry patrol since the park was established. The CFi’s patrols are sometimes supported by an official from the Fisheries Administration or even the Navy, he said, but mostly it’s just the CFi officers who are left to sound the alarm to the nearest cantonment of Fisheries Administration officers.

“The trawlers [have] already left [by the time] the Fisheries Administration from Sihanoukville arrive — it’s like the trawlers know [the CFi’s] patrol [routine], we can’t do anything against them because our speedboat is small,” Ra said. “However, if we had large-engine speedboats, we could patrol effectively to prevent the illegal trawlers.”

Despite claiming marine conservation would be a priority, Dith Tina, the minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, did not respond to Mongabay’s interview requests or written questions. Nor did officials from the Fisheries Administration within his ministry, including the director-general, Phum Sotha, and the conservation director, Ouk Vibol.

CAPFISH capsizing

Embodying the government’s apparent apathy toward addressing the coastal crisis is the red card issued by the European Union, which bans imports of Cambodian seafood products due to the government’s failure to adopt basic measures to prevent IUU fishing. The red card was issued in 2013 and remains in place more than 11 years later, despite the EU delegation to Cambodia having spent some 112 million euros ($121 million) since 2019 on a project called CAPFISH geared in part toward getting Cambodia’s red card lifted by building fisheries management capacity.

Led by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for its coastal elements, the CAPFISH project also involves the U.N.’s Industrial Development Organization and the Cambodian Fisheries Administration. Its high-level goal is to replenish Cambodia’s inland and marine fisheries.

Even if it’s reluctant to publicly acknowledge them, the Cambodian government appears to be aware of both the problems threatening the country’s marine fisheries and the potential solutions, and it worked with CAPFISH to develop the National Plan of Control and Inspection for Marine Fisheries to guide government policy from 2020 to 2024. However, targets have largely been missed, despite being self-imposed.

Chief among them was the revision of the 2006 Fisheries Law by 2022 — which still hasn’t happened. Likewise, a subdecree on marine fisheries management and distant-water fishing, slated to enter into force in 2021, is yet to materialize. What the planned legislation would change remains unclear as no public drafts have been released.

Besides lacking legal frameworks to guide the fight against IUU fishing, authorities are also woefully underequipped. The 2020 national plan noted that “There are extremely limited materials and equipment available for enforcement at the national and provincial level.” When the report was written, the Fisheries Administration’s inspectorate had just two 18-meter (59-foot) patrol boats, both 36 years old and carrying “minimal modern surveillance equipment.”

The aim of modernizing both Cambodia’s commercial fishing fleet and the authorities who are supposed to regulate it was clearly mapped out in the national plan, which called for the licensing and registration of all fishing vessels by 2024. But despite a national campaign to register boats, incentivized by heavy discounts for fishers, only 3,225 of 7,552 vessels — around 42% — were registered by December 2023, according to Heng Suthy, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Works and Transport.

On May 27, the Fisheries Administration launched a campaign to encourage commercial fishers across coastal provinces to get licenses, but no data have been released yet.

The need for vessel monitoring systems (VMS) to track vessels’ locations in real time was raised in the national plan, but only 125 vessels have so far installed VMS. Only vessels longer than 18 m need to do so, but government data from 2018 counting 3,512 vessels of 12-24 m (39-79 ft) suggest the majority of vessels required to use VMS haven’t installed it.

The EU delegation to Cambodia, the FAO, Fauna & Flora and a host of local NGOs and researchers declined to speak about the impact of IUU fishing on Cambodia’s marine conservation efforts. Most cited the perceived sensitivity of the issue.

CAPFISH is due to end in 2025, though few of its ambitions have yet been realized. But already, a new internationally funded effort is underway to prevent the collapse of Cambodia’s coastal fisheries.

New project, same problems

In December 2022, the ADB put together a $104 million financing package that aims to rejuvenate 40% of Cambodia’s nearshore fisheries. The project takes a wide-reaching and comprehensive approach that seeks to replicate successes by a small NGO called Marine Conservation Cambodia in the country’s smallest province, Kep, which accounts for just 26.5 km (16.5 mi) of Cambodia’s 435-km coastline, along a far wider stretch of the coast in Kampot, Koh Kong and Preah Sihanouk provinces.

Specific goals include revitalizing 25 of the 41 coastal CFis, deploying as many as 100,000 concrete anti-trawling devices — structures that snag trawling nets under the sea — and developing new MFMAs like the one governing Koh Rong Marine National Park.

The ADB project is in the early stages, but anti-trawling devices are expected to be deployed across all coastal provinces in the coming months. Staff at the ADB’s Cambodia office declined to comment.

However, the plan seems at odds with some of the government’s current policies, in particular its intention to create trawling zones within the nearshore exclusion zone comprising waters of 20 m (66 ft) or shallower. This would open fishing grounds currently reserved for small-scale fishers to industrial trawlers.

Mongabay found multiple instances, both from reporting on the ground and from satellite data, of trawlers operating illegally in the nearshore exclusion zone. Communities point to these transgressions as the chief reason for their smaller catches and lost income. The severe limitations on enforcement of MFMAs, CFis and marine national parks raise questions about how well designated inshore trawling zones would function.

Another government fisheries reform initiative with questionable returns is Cambodia’s becoming a party, in 2019, to the FAO’s Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA). This internationally binding agreement sets minimum standards for authorities to prevent IUU catches from being landed at ports. However, it only applies to foreign vessels and could be undermined by data and reports from fishing communities suggesting most transshipment of illegally caught seafood happens on the water, away from inspectors’ eyes, rather than at ports.

Potentially limiting the PSMA’s efficacy further is Cambodia’s choice for the first port to begin implementing PSMA rules: an unfinished port being built in Botum Sakor National Park by Ly Yong Phat, a notorious ruling party senator and tycoon famed for environmental destruction across Koh Kong province.

Joining the EU and the ADB as international funders of Cambodian fisheries reform is the Australian government. It runs a regional project aimed at closing gaps in monitoring, control and surveillance frameworks that includes training Cambodian fisheries authorities, according to Justin Bathurst, general manager of fisheries operations at the Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Bathurst would not answer specific questions on where these gaps were in Cambodia.

Sink or swim

For those who rely on the country’s marine resources, the consequences of these gaps are very real.

The situation in Koh Rong Marine National Park is dire, according to one crab fisher, who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity, citing fears of the networks behind large trawlers operating illegally in the park’s waters.

“[Trawlers] operate in both shallow and deep waters, they don’t care about the loss of the corals,” the crab fisher said. “They violate the areas by fishing [illegally] and we, the small fishermen, cannot catch enough.”

He said patrols by the Fisheries Administration and the CFis seem almost deliberately ineffective, and suggested that bribery was perhaps an explanation for this.

“When they conduct patrols for one hour or two hours, the illegal trawling starts after that. When we sleep, the illegal trawlers operate,” the crab fisher said. “This is the ongoing crisis. If they allow illegal fishing [to continue], the marine resources will be gone and the regular fishermen will not catch enough to sustain their livelihoods.”

Sitting almost dead center on Cambodia’s coastline, Koh Rong — and the problems in its waters — serve as a grim reflection of the future for small-scale fishers throughout the country.

Communities are now languishing as these issues remain unaddressed, and the government’s track record under CAPFISH suggests the ADB’s project will be fighting an uphill battle.

An international fisheries expert, who requested anonymity due to their work with governments around the world, said fisheries management and law enforcement was effectively “absent” in Cambodia.

“Given the significant resources being given to Cambodia for fisheries management, it sounds like they are not being well spent with such basic things not being addressed,” said the expert, who previously worked on Cambodia’s marine fisheries. “Cambodia is among the worst I’ve heard of, especially in Southeast Asia, for the absence of effective enforcement and management.”

All countries face these issues in some form, according to the expert, but registration and VMS on industrial fleets is “really the most basic thing a country can do.”

The expert warned that the situation in Cambodia will likely play out in one of two ways: Either Cambodia’s government finally addresses the issues raised through the EU’s carding system, taking the difficult steps necessary to get its fishing fleet compliant and protect its fish stocks from overexploitation; or fisheries will be left to diminish until it’s uneconomical for Cambodians to fish anymore as there’ll be nothing left to catch.

“These issues can absolutely be addressed if Cambodia develops the political will to do it,” the expert said.

Citations:

Roig-Boixeda, P., Chea, P., Brozovic, R., You, R., Neung, S., San, T., … West, K. (2018). Using patrol records and local perceptions to inform management and enforcement in a marine protected area in Cambodia. Cambodian Journal of Natural History, (1), 9-23. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326158205_Using_patrol_records_and_local_perceptions_to_inform_management_and_enforcement_in_a_marine_protected_area_in_Cambodia

Kem, A., & Born, D. (2023). Effectiveness and conservation of marine fisheries management areas in Koh Rong, Cambodia. Cambodia Journal of Basic and Applied Research, 5(1), 59-69. doi:10.61945/cjbar.2023.5.1.6

Banner image: A trawler offloads its catch onto a smaller transport vessel off the coast of Koh Rong. Screenshot from ‘Illegal fishing and land grabs push Cambodian coastal communities to the brink’ by Andy Ball / Mongabay.