- A surge in deforestation alerts from Cambodia’s Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary has raised concerns over the role of a controversial, politically-connected timber firm in illegal logging.
- While investigators say they have amassed evidence of widespread illegalities in Think Biotech’s operations in the sanctuary, its director told Mongabay the company was the victim of loggers using the its concession as a thoroughfare between the sanctuary and export destinations.
- Activists and researchers are amassing evidence of a network of organized forestry crimes in the sanctuary, but they say efforts to follow the money are stymied by government inaction or denials and overly measured responses from international NGOs.
PHNOM PENH – A surge in deforestation alerts from Cambodia’s Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary has raised fresh concerns over the role of a controversial timber firm in illegal logging.
The 34,000-hectare (17,000 acre) Think Biotech concession was approved in 2012 under an agreement between Cambodia and South Korea aiming to “reduce pressure on natural forests” along Prey Lang’s eastern boundary.
Campaigners who monitor logging in Prey Lang say large parts of the concession were in fact already covered by diverse natural forest that has now been replaced by an Acacia tree plantation, with huge costs to biodiversity, river pollution and the local indigenous Kuy and Khmer populations.
The Prey Lang protected area covers the provinces of Kampong Thom, Kratie, Stung Treng and Preah Vihear and was designated a wildlife sanctuary in May 2016.
Activists and researchers are amassing evidence of a network of organized forestry crimes in Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, but they say efforts to follow the money are stymied by government inaction or denials and overly measured responses from international NGOs.
Global Forest Watch data corroborates what activists have reported over the past five months: GLAD alerts ramp up starting in December, and begin stretching further inside the protected area’s northern and southern tips through the first quarter of 2020.
Recent satellite imagery and deforestation alerts also show significant activity in eastern Prey Lang next to the Think Biotech concession, according to Ida Theilade, an academic at University of Copenhagen who has studied the region for more than a decade.
“In recent months, we had satellite imagery showing that there was a road being constructed into the Prey Lang sanctuary from the Think Biotech concession, and logging was going on along the road,” she said. “It’s a new development, but then again, Think Biotech has been in numerous reports for many years connected to illegal logging.”
Logging activity in Cambodia is usually most intense during the dry season, which starts in December and continues until the end of May, but Theilade said logging activity in the first quarter of 2020 raised alarms because it was clustered around Think Biotech and other concessions in the north.
She suspects the increased activity may be linked to the environment ministry’s ban of patrols by the Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN), an established activist group that monitors illegal logging in the four provinces the sanctuary spans.
“The ground patrollers are there, they live there, they know who’s going in and out of the forest, they can see the transport going on, so it’s very hard to beat local knowledge of what’s going on,” she told Mongabay. “They are the forefront if you want to both monitor and protect the forest.”
Many farmers in the area reported having lost farmland to Think Biotech’s clear-cutting after the concession was granted, as well as forest resources that are an important supplementary, sustainable source of income, such as resin trees, rattan, mushrooms and herbs. Additionally, locals allege the company made no effort to consult them prior to starting work, nor to preserve burial grounds or forested areas considered sacred.
Organized protests against the firm started in May 2013. After being initially rebuffed, the protesters won limited concessions for the 1,900 families affected. In 2017 campaigners attempted to petition the South Korean embassy to halt the continued expansion of logging and planting in the concession without success.
In February this year, PLCN members and supporters gathered in cities across Stung Treng, Kratie, Kampong Thom and Preah Vihear provinces, preparing to enter the forest for a blessing ceremony, which combines Buddhist spirituality and the traditions of the Kuy indigenous people who live in and around the sanctuary, to raise awareness of continued illegal logging. Hundreds of people who planned to attend were blocked from entering by provincial environmental officials, acting on orders from the environment ministry.
Ouch Leng, an acclaimed forest campaigner and a 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, was detained with three other activists – one of whom was reportedly beaten – in March by company security, who confiscated camera and GPS equipment Leng was using to document evidence of secret sawmills linked to Angkor Plywood, a timber processing firm.
Think Biotech’s original owners, South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Corporation, appear to have relinquished control of the company in 2018, according to filings with Cambodia’s commerce ministry. Its current chairman, Taiwanese national Lu Chu Chang, is also a director of Angkor Plywood and president of the Cambodia Timber Industry Association.
Leng said Angkor Plywood has become “seemingly a monopoly in the timber business” in recent years, illegally harvesting resin trees owned by local residents near its concession and smuggling the sawn timber abroad, likely to Vietnam and China.
“I have evidence showing that even poor loggers must sell timber to [the] company; if not they would be arrested and logging companies also guaranteed … legal protection to those loggers,” he said. “We have also followed timber trucks from the protected forest and we found timber was being supplied to [Angkor Plywood’s] sawmill.”
Global Witness, the anti-corruption group, has documented what it calls Lu’s “long association with illegal logging” stretching back to the early 2000s, when he ran another timber firm in Cambodia, Cherndar Plywood, which was also alleged to have unlawfully cut villagers’ resin trees in the same province.
Under scrutiny
Lu denied any involvement in illegal logging by Angkor Plywood or Think Biotech. Speaking at his unmarked office on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, he said 90% of the timber processed by his companies was sold locally, without divulging the final destination of exports.
Rather than being a perpetrator of illegal logging, Lu said he was the victim of loggers using the Think Biotech concession as a thoroughfare between the sanctuary and export destinations.
Lu told Mongabay the environment ministry had ordered him not to intervene when loggers entered the concession from the sanctuary. “I agreed, but then [I told officials that] you cannot say the trouble always comes from me,” he said. “I am not the government, I’m a private person, and I cannot go against the government’s will.”
Leng, the forest campaigner, says he has amassed a mountain of evidence to counter the company’s denials – enough to warrant a serious investigation, though an official probe into recent evidence is unlikely to be forthcoming, or to yield results for campaigners if one does materialize.
Both Think Biotech and Angkor Plywood were the subject of an official investigation requested last year by the environment ministry after it was sent evidence of illegal logging by the European Union and USAID, the U.S. government’s foreign development agency. But the forestry administration, which has a long-documented history of involvement in illegal logging and whose jurisdiction the Think Biotech concession falls under, later cleared the companies of all wrongdoing.
Matthew Edwardsen, chief of party to the $21-million Greening Prey Lang project, said that his team was advocating for the PLCN and other community patrols, and trying to reestablish joint patrols between government rangers and PLCN members, which existed until the network was banned in February.
Edwardsen acknowledged he had seen logging within the sanctuary grounds and heard of residents being compelled to sell their resin trees for timber, though he said he did not have sufficient evidence to connect it to a single company.
“We provide that information to the ministry…we’ve been pushing this topic with every single person we’re talking with,” he said. “It’s not something we hear about and just kind of continue, it’s a huge issue that we’re trying to address.”
Sothea, a resident of Siem Bouk district in Stung Treng province, began monitoring the trucks hauling timber out of the Prey Lang sanctuary in mid-April, as the rest of the country shut down to celebrate Khmer New Year. “The forest has almost become a field now,” he said.
Resin has been an alternative income source promoted by development organizations as a way to discourage illegal logging, but Sothea, a member of PLCN who has not patrolled with them recently, said he can no longer earn the $500 to $700 a month he once could from selling to the district market.
Now, a new customer – Angkor Plywood, activists say, though Lu insisted he only used resin trees from within his plantation – is buying resin trees from loggers in Kratie and Stung Treng provinces, some of whom reportedly fell the trees without explicit permission.
Sothea’s family’s plantations only stretch into two areas of the forest, but he patrols five different areas in Siem Bouk district to record signs of illegal logging on his own. He said that most of the families in his community had given up on their resin trees and some Siem Bouk residents had become loggers themselves. Nevertheless he is determined to preserve his own resin trees.
“I cannot be the only one who thinks that patrolling is very important,” Sothea said. “In the past, government officials and the Prime Minister had appealed to the public to participate in forest protection. But now that we are participating, we are accused of trespassing and breaking the law. I do not understand it.”
Additional reporting by Thim Rachna.
Banner image: A sawmill under construction near the Think Biotech concession in Cambodia. Photo courtesy of the Prey Lang Community Network.
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