Fishers left with no land, no fish, in fire sale of Cambodian coast

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

KOH KONG & PREAH SIHANOUK, Cambodia — By 11 a.m., the sun was already beating down on Daem Thkov. The chatter of tourists on the nearby beach floated on the gentle sea breeze through the fishing village on the Cambodian island of Koh Rong.

But behind the tranquil scenes of turquoise waters, white sands and morning cocktails, an uncertainty has gripped those who call Daem Thkov home.

What the tourists sipping cocktails on the beach that morning were likely unaware of is that almost the entirety of Koh Rong has been leased out to one of the country’s most powerful and notorious conglomerates. Royal Group’s project throws into question the protection conferred upon the island by Koh Rong Marine National Park and leaves residents doubting their future on the island in the face of the $300 million tourism development.

“We see that Royal Group has not carried out critical development yet,” said Pel Ra, deputy leader of the Daem Thkov community fishery (CFi) on Koh Rong. “The people here instead have fear and concern … Although [Royal Group] has built road networks, they have land issues with the people.”

While tourism has long been the mainstay of Koh Rong’s local economy, many residents of Daem Thkov still rely on fishing, and it’s the task of Ra and the CFi, a team of civilians, to patrol their fishing grounds and report illegal fishing activity to the authorities. The CFi members can’t make arrests themselves, though, and trawlers pillage their waters unfazed by the protected status of Koh Rong Marine National Park. CFi members also now face another threat from land as Royal Group gears up to develop the island, leaving many in a panic over what will come next.

Among the estimated 3,100 residents on Koh Rong and neighboring Koh Rong Sanloem, some hope to sell their land to Royal Group; others fear it will be taken from them. But with no publicly available social and environmental impact assessment, even 16 years after the company signed the lease on the island and five years after it officially announced its development plans, the future remains uncertain.

“I agree with the Royal Group development plan and I’ll be very happy if the people who live here permanently can still live here,” Ra said. “However, we cannot know and we cannot assume what is going on with compensation policy. We still have fear. We still feel nervous about it.”

The double threat, from land and sea, extends beyond Koh Rong to much of the Cambodian coastline. Illegal fishing, chiefly embodied by rampant, unchecked trawling in protected and prohibited waters, has devastated fish stocks, trashed marine ecosystems, and left coastal communities in dire poverty, according to the more than 30 people Mongabay spoke to across Koh Kong and Preah Sihanouk provinces in March 2024.

At the same time, the land is being sold out from under them as roughly 225 kilometers of Cambodia’s 435-kilometer coastline (140 out of 270 miles) has been sold off to Cambodia’s tycoon class since 2000, with a slew of new projects announced in the last five years closing off access to the sea and piling more pressure on coastal fishers whose livelihoods were already hanging by a thread.

Going wrong on Koh Rong

Cambodia’s flagship marine conservation project, Koh Rong Marine National Park was initially established as a marine fisheries management area in 2016. The archipelago graduated to marine national park status in 2018.

Government data show the national park spans 47,137 hectares (116,478 acres) of water and 5,361 hectares (13,247 acres) of terrestrial landscapes, embodying a ridge-to-reef approach that extends protection across the park’s interconnected mountains, forests, mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass meadows and community fishing grounds.

Cambodia’s first marine protected area aimed to preserve ecosystems by banning trawling in the park’s waters, but it was powerless to protect against the ambitions of well-connected developers, despite restrictions placed on the nature of developments within protected areas.

Cambodia’s largest conglomerate, Royal Group, signed a 99-year lease for Koh Rong, the archipelago’s largest island, in 2008 — a decade before the national park was established. Between 2008 and 2010, according to government documents, more than 180,000 hectares (445,000 acres) across 28 of Cambodia’s 64 islands had been sold off, including Koh Rong. In 2018, then-prime minister Hun Sen threatened to revoke island leases if developers failed to deliver.

Despite Cambodia’s Land Law dictating that developers need to show progress within 12 months of such concessions being awarded, Royal Group did very little with the island until 2019, when the company announced its $300 million tourism project. The plans for the island now reportedly include an international airport, hotels, casinos, commercial facilities and golf courses. In all, the company is set to clear more than 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres) of Koh Rong’s forests.

While fishing villages appear to be spared under the latest plans, the same cannot be said for the mangrove forests that serve as crucial fish-spawning grounds. These carbon-rich habitats are likely to be among the island’s worst-affected ecosystems. Royal Group has already destroyed some of Koh Rong’s mangroves to build roads, but with no publicly available environmental impact assessment, it’s difficult to quantify the damage.

The lack of transparency surrounding the project is characteristic of Royal Group’s chairman, Kith Meng, a billionaire tycoon close to Prime Minister Hun Manet. He also served as a longtime adviser to Manet’s father, former prime minister Hun Sen. As is fitting for a Cambodian tycoon of his stature, Meng’s business portfolio is expansive and his commercial empire has left a trail of environmental destruction in its wake.

While the Ministry of Environment has praised Royal Group’s Koh Rong project, residents of Koh Touch village blocked bulldozers building a new road in 2015, fearing it would affect their homes. Then, in 2020, 53 families on the island protested a 35-hectare (86-acre) clearing they were told came under Royal Group’s 99-year lease.

One Koh Rong resident in Prek Svay village, whose family opened a small restaurant to serve the construction workers hired by Royal Group, told Mongabay that he would simply aim to get a job working with the company once their tourism project was operational.

Another, also in Prek Svay, was less optimistic, telling reporters that the company’s land grab was a throwback to the Khmer Rouge regime, and decrying Royal Group’s plans as communism.

But it’s not just those on the ground who are concerned.

The World Bank wrote in 2023 that “With Royal Group’s master plan and the [marine fisheries management area] zoning scheme being entirely at odds, it remains to be seen how the luxury tourism development plan will be implemented without undermining the [marine protected area’s] ecological and social objectives.”

The World Bank warned that uncoordinated, opaque private investments such as Royal Group’s project on Koh Rong are threatening Cambodia’s conservation efforts.

Royal Group’s lease of Koh Rong reflects “recurrent patterns” of “opportunistic coastal land development.” The approval of “mega-scale land uses” have been lacking in transparency, often “in favor of certain stakeholder groups” with “insufficient evidence of compliance,” particularly in regard to environmental and social impact assessments, the World Bank wrote.

Cambodia’s corporate coast

The near-wholesale privatization of Koh Rong represents just a fragment of the fire sale that’s happening across the Cambodian coast. Mongabay found documents pertaining to the sale or private development of at least 16 islands across Kep, Koh Kong and Preah Sihanouk provinces, although Koh Kong provincial officials announced plans to develop all 23 of the province’s islands and in Preah Sihanouk, 20 out of 30 islands have already been handed over to investors.

Almost all of what is publicly known about these coastal land sales has been tied to a cabal of what Reuters described as the “Khmer riche,” an elite segment of the population whose wealth is tied up with their political connections to the highest members of government.

In Kep province, infamous timber baron Try Pheap announced he was making a $130 million investment to transform Koh Tonsay, including the development of a cable car. The U.S.-sanctioned timber trader’s business portfolio was built on illegally gutting Cambodian rainforests, but this hasn’t stopped Try Pheap Group from submitting a bid to develop Koh Tbal, also in Kep province. Try Pheap’s deep-sea port in Kampot province also saw fishing communities lose out as more of Cambodia’s coast fell into the tycoon’s hands.

Meanwhile in Koh Kong province, government officials, ruling party senator Kok An and former tourism minister Lay Prohas are privately developing Koh Toteung, Koh Smach and the Koh Ampil archipelago. These developments have smothered coral reefs in sand to make way for artificial beaches and bays, and leveled forests for accommodations. The islands within the Koh S’dach archipelago being developed encompass less than 550 hectares (1,360 acres) of landmass, but have lost 225 hectares (556 acres) of forest since 2000, much of it in the last four years.

Off the coast of Cambodia’s largest port city, Sihanoukville, inside Ream Marine National Park, almost the entire island of Koh Thmei has been divided up among companies, the largest chunk going to a venture controlled by Hun To, nephew of former prime minister Hun Sen. Another section of the island went to Fu Xianting, a Chinese national and former People’s Liberation Army officer. Fu has a close, personal relationship with the Cambodian Prime Minister’s Bodyguard Unit, whose head was also sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018.

With the exception of Koh Rong and Koh S’dach, many of the islands being developed are uninhabited, but each of them plays a role in the interconnected marine ecosystem that supports biodiversity and fills fishers’ nets. Some harbor marine life or provide habitats, others are vital for fish nurseries, and many hold large quantities of carbon within the marine sediment lapping their shores.

Just northwest of Koh Thmei, on the border of Ream Marine National Park, is the 934-hectare (2,308-acre) Bay of Lights land reclamation project that has denied fishers access to their usual fishing grounds as untold tons of sand are poured into the sea to create what is supposed to be a $16 billion eco-city.

At the helm of this gargantuan, albeit somewhat stalled, project sits Prince Group, headed by Chen Zhi, a Chinese national by birth who, like many of his compatriots, purchased Cambodian citizenship. But unlike other naturalized Chinese-Cambodians, Chen worked his way into the role of a personal adviser to former prime minister Hun Sen and recently faced detailed allegations that his company’s empire was built on crime. Such connections likely helped Chen avoid consequences when Canopy Sands, one of his companies involved in the Bay of Lights project, dumped hundreds of millions of tons of sand into Ream Bay without conducting an environmental impact assessment.

The Ministry of Environment, which is responsible for the management of protected areas, didn’t respond to questions sent by Mongabay, nor did the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, which manages land concessions.

Land grabbing and displacement are countrywide phenomena in Cambodia. Data from Licadho, a local rights group that documents land grabs, show that concessionaires control roughly 14% of Cambodia’s landmass, resulting in widespread deforestation and displacement of communities.

“We have seen a number of new, large-scale agricultural land concessions given out in recent years that have all the characteristics of an [economic land concession], but are not being labeled as such,” said Naly Pilorge, Licadho’s outreach director. “It doesn’t appear that the government considers these concessions, which are [economic land concessions] in all but name, to be prohibited under the 2012 moratorium [on new economic land concessions].”

Conservative estimates suggest more than 400,000 Cambodians were forcibly evicted as a result of concessions between 2003 and 2012, but very few received adequate compensation — if any at all.

No fish, no farm and no hope

While the future of these coastal development plans is far from secured — and Cambodian islands are notoriously bought up and then sold on again — the fate of fishing communities living along the coast of Botum Sakor National Park on the mainland has long since been sealed.

With roughly 160 km (100 mi) of coastline, Botum Sakor National Park was a stronghold of coastal fishing communities whose members recalled to Mongabay a life of easy access to the bountiful sea. That was until 2008, when a Chinese company called Union Development Group (UDG) was granted an economic land concession that blocked off some 90 km (56 mi) of the shore. UDG’s two concessions now span 45,100 hectares (111,440 acres) of the national park — more than four times the legal limit of 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres) for concessions — and have displaced more than 1,000 families.

“Union Development Group came to my community in 2014,” said Keo Vannob, a fisher who now ekes out a living on the coast of Botum Sakor National Park. “They started to build roads in 2016, and that’s when they started to evict people.”

Vannob’s family were pushed from the land they had farmed for generations out onto the coast, only to find trawlers plundering the waters, leaving Vannob with no farm and no fish. He’s since been forced to switch to catching crabs, as there simply aren’t enough fish anymore. And to avoid the trawlers operating illegally inshore, he must now travel farther to cast his nets, roughly 10 km (6 mi) out to sea — a dangerous voyage in his rickety wooden fishing boat.

“I do worry, but I have to persist through the storms and rains so that I can feed my family, otherwise they cannot survive,” Vannob said. “Previously, we relied on farming, but the company took our land and so now we have to rely on fishing.”

The UDG evictions forced as many as 1,333 families from their land, often violently. Police, military personnel and private security hired by UDG torched homes and brutalized villagers, many of whom had been fishers with small parcels of farmland. In the years that followed UDG’s entry into Botum Sakor National Park, their lives were upended, with only meager compensation and a ramshackle relocation site far from the coast offered by the company.

In some ways, Vannob’s family was lucky. While they lost 20 hectares (49 acres) of farmland in Ta Nuon commune, they were able to retain their house in Thma Sa commune, close to Kien Tuk Beach. But their home is within an undeveloped section of UDG’s concession, and Vannob said local authorities routinely visit to harass his family and threaten them with eviction.

“I worry about our future and my children,” he said. “When I get older, if the trawlers are still operating, I worry that our life will be very difficult and that we’ll lose our land to the company. If we lose our land, our children will have no place to live and they will become servants.”

The pressure from authorities has eased somewhat since UDG was first granted its concessions, though. Chaan Pov, Vannob’s mother-in-law, recalled the police pointing guns at her during the initial evictions, which reached her farm in Ta Nuon commune in 2014.

“I told them, if I die on my riceland, I will do so with meaning,” Pov said, adding how she was offered $8,000 to relocate, which she declined before negotiations turned violent. “I have 10 children, $8,000 was not enough to share with them all.”

The authorities destroyed her rice crop, even though it was almost ready for harvest, and seized her land, but many others saw their homes bulldozed, razed or otherwise destroyed while they were handcuffed by soldiers. Evictees from various fishing communities along the coast of Botum Sakor National Park were pushed, by violence and desperation, into Pov’s home near the beach in Thma Sa commune’s Kien Tuk village.

But she said she couldn’t care for them all. UDG and local authorities soon accused her of fomenting protests against the company. “The people who came here lost their livelihoods and they resettled here in order to catch fish,” she said.

“If we have to leave this area, we will die … Here we have the sea, we have food to eat, that’s why I don’t want to leave,” she added. “In the future, I will be hopeless because our rice farm and other lands are completely gone. The trawlers also destroy everything. How can the fish survive and reproduce for the people to make a living?”

Five years of misery

Those seeking to flee the enveloping maw of UDG’s tourism ambitions found that there were few other options in Botum Sakor. Almost the entire national park has since been sold, with scarcely 14% of its original 182,342 hectares (450,577 acres) remaining protected. The majority of the land has gone to wealthy private developers, almost all of which have ties to the highest levels of Cambodian politics.

UDG couldn’t be reached by phone and didn’t respond to emailed questions. When Mongabay visited the company’s office in Phnom Penh, a skeleton crew of secretaries agreed to pass on written questions, but no reply has been received.

The company was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2020 for alleged corruption linking it to local authorities and high-ranking military officials that enabled gross human rights violations within its Botum Sakor National Park concession.

After evicting so many families, UDG has done surprisingly little with its 45,100 hectares of land. Mongabay visited the Dara Sakor tourism development site within UDG’s concession and found an unfinished international airport, untended golf courses, and largely dormant hotel-casino complexes, which have been repeatedly linked to human trafficking.

Yet neither UDG nor the government have offered much support to the fishing communities UDG displaced.

“More than 350 families have approached Licadho to report suffering from land conflicts with UDG,” said Pilorge, the group’s outreach director. “This is a fraction of the overall number of families impacted, and does not account for families who were too fearful to file complaints or who were coerced into accepting inadequate compensation.”

In conjunction with the Koh Kong provincial authorities, UDG offered homes in a 2,500-hectare (6,200-acre) relocation site within Botum Sakor National Park to those it had displaced, via a government-run lottery. Local authorities promised running water, electricity, arable land, health centers, roads, schools and opportunities to earn a living. But residents have long complained about the absence of these amenities.

“At our old house, we were a short walk to the ocean. When we went to the sea, we could catch crabs and shrimps,” said one resident of the relocation site who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “Here, it’s so far that it takes us two to three hours [to get to the ocean]. We spend more on gasoline than what we earn from our catches. Here we can’t sell anything and we’re so poor.”

The evictee was relocated to the makeshift site in 2019, but found none of the promised amenities or infrastructure had been built. Five years later, she said, the situation remains equally dire, and most transplants to the site have up and left.

Mongabay found dilapidated shacks slowly rotting away under the sun and sea air, and just a handful of families who, with nowhere else to go, have endured. They haven’t received land titles confirming their ownership of their plots in the relocation site. It’s a far cry from the life they once enjoyed as fishers with farms.

“In the old village, life was happy and convenient. Even if we didn’t have money, we had rice to eat, we were happy that we could catch crabs, prawns or fish,” the anonymous evictee explained. “After moving here, we have to buy everything, yet we don’t have money to buy anything.”

Her cashew crops, which she said occupied 10 hectares (25 acres) in the old village in Botum Sakor National Park, were torched by local authorities. Her husband, a fisherman in his 60s, now leaves at 3 a.m. and is gone almost all day, but rarely returns with more than enough seafood to feed the family.

“We don’t have money for our kids to go to school,” the evictee said, fighting back tears. “We ask them to skip school until my husband makes a bit of money. We have nothing to survive here.”

Banner image: Keo Vannob returns from fishing to his home in Botum Sakor National Park. Screenshot from ‘Illegal fishing and land grabs push Cambodian coastal communities to the brink’ by Andy Ball / Mongabay.