- Conservationists have expressed concern over a recently published regulation that makes nearly 127,000 hectares (313,800 acres) of previously protected land potentially available for sale or rent to politically connected businesses.
- Known as Sub-decree No. 30, the order is ostensibly meant to redistribute land to communities that had previously lost control of it after it was taken over by the Ministry of Environment and conservation NGOs to manage as protected areas.
- But activists and experts point to several features of the regulation — the proximity of some of the requisitioned land to concessions held by powerful magnates; the inclusion of uninhabited primary forest; the opacity of the land-titling process promised to local communities — that suggest it’s another form of land grabbing.
A new regulation signed into law in March this year but only unveiled publicly in May will see almost 127,000 hectares (313,800 acres) of previously protected land in Cambodia made available for sale or rent, prompting fears among conservationists about a land grab for some of the country’s best-preserved ecosystems.
On paper, Sub-decree No. 30 , signed March 2 by Prime Minister Hun Sen, transfers ownership of 126,928.39 hectares from the Ministry of Environment and the various conservation NGOs that assist in the management of the protected areas, to the Koh Kong provincial administration. Ostensibly, this transfer of land, measuring half the size of Luxembourg, is meant “for distribution to people, while retaining partial land as private property to be held by Koh Kong Provincial Administration.”
It’s seen as a readjustment of the protected areas, the mapping of which saw thousands of Cambodians lose their homes as the government and conservation NGOs took control of land that had housed many communities for generations. As such, this latest sub-decree presents an opportunity for many communities living in cleared sections of the protected areas to acquire land titles — but it also presents an opportunity for tycoons with connections to the Koh Kong provincial land management committee, chaired by Governor Mithona Puthong of Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party.
Puthong’s father, Yuth Puthong previously also served as governor of Koh Kong, while his grandfather, Say Puthong, was a senior politician who helped shape Hun Sen’s leadership in the 1980s. In short, the family is deeply entrenched in the political networks of power brokers in Cambodia.
Sources familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, have warned that just half of the 127,000 hectares listed in the sub-decree will actually go to landless families. Ten percent is expected to be held for future land titling, while conservationists say that as much as 40% — roughly 50,000 hectares (123,600 acres) of protected areas — will likely be sold off to wealthy tycoons with business interests across Koh Kong.
“To me this is a repetition of what we have seen in Hun Sen’s Cambodia for many years now: the privatization of a valuable public asset – such as land, timber, etc. – for the benefit of the corrupt elite that rules over the country,” said Alex Gonzalez-Davidson, leader of the environmental activist group Mother Nature Cambodia.
While he welcomed the move on the grounds of legitimate claims to land ownership within Koh Kong’s protected areas, he feared that the sub-decree is open to abuse at a time when environmental defenders – those best placed to expose such abuses – have found themselves in the government’s crosshairs.
Criminal prosecution of Mother Nature Cambodia activists made international headlines twice in just two months: In May, three members were sentenced by the Phnom Penh Municipal Court to between 18 and 20 months in prison on incitement charges after they planned a peaceful one-woman protest march. Then in June, four members, including Gonzalez-Davidson, who had been deported in 2015 and banned from entering Cambodia, were charged with “plotting to overthrow the government” and denounced as terrorists after they documented sewage flowing into the Tonle Sap River in Phnom Penh.
The legal harassment of environmental activists in Cambodia comes at a time when many protected areas in the country are experiencing unprecedented levels of deforestation. Gonzalez-Davidson said he fears Koh Kong’s national parks and wildlife sanctuaries will suffer a similar fate, despite the ecotourism potential the province boasts.
“When it comes to this repeated privatization of public land, the short answer is that local residents lose, the state loses, and needless to say the nation loses, while decision-makers and their business partners make a killing,” he said, adding that previous concessions in Koh Kong have resulted in widespread environmental crimes.
Environmental chaos in Koh Kong
Overall, nearly 70% of the land reallotted by the sub-decree is forested, with 25% covered in primary forest, according to satellite data visualized on the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch. Many of the plats, particularly those in Tatai Wildlife Sanctuary and Botum Sakor National Park, are still largely swathed in old-growth rainforest. Several also encompass coastal mangroves.
Land governance in Cambodia has long been dominated by the personal politics of a select cadre of ruling elites. Political and economic influence have led to widespread environmental crimes that violate both domestic law and international conventions, with watchdog organizations and institutions alleging the government is directly connected to the destruction of ecosystems and Indigenous cultures as big players in Cambodia’s political club seek to exploit natural resources for illicit enrichment.
Furthermore, while Cambodia announced a halt to new hydropower dams on the Mekong River back in March 2020, the damming of Koh Kong’s rivers is set to increase fourfold, with nine additional hydropower projects planned throughout the province, mostly backed by Chinese financiers, on top of the existing three in Srae Ambel, Mondol Seima and Thma Bang districts.
“The biggest impact of the dams built in the area around 10 years ago came during construction, and in particular during the clearing of the reservoirs,” said Gonzalez-Davidson, whose campaigning led to the cancellation of a hydropower dam in Koh Kong.
He pointed to Timber Green, a company owned by infamous logging magnate Try Pheap, but reportedly part-owned by Hun Sen’s daughter, Hun Mana, who has numerous business interests across Koh Kong.
Timber Green’s exclusive rights to clearing parts of Koh Kong for the construction of a reservoir to support hydropower projects became a major source of illegal revenue for Pheap, Hun Mana and the military, police and local authorities who protected Timber Green’s operations, according to Gonzalez-Davidson.
“Any piece of expensive timber in the whole Cardamom mountains range, very rarely actually came from the reservoir areas they had the right to clear, it was laundered through the company, with the state seeing virtually none of the money,” he said, noting that millions of dollars’ worth of Grade 1 timber left the Cardamoms Mountains in 2010 and 2011.
But the ecological impact, fueled by alleged corruption, doesn’t end at deforestation. Inflated costs of construction further the flow of illicit money, which in turn makes delays to the project more profitable for the tangled web of people involved, dragging the whole process out over years, which often comes with encroachment into protected areas and widespread poaching, according to Gonzalez-Davidson.
The Cardamoms are considered among the most pristine and species-rich habitats in the region, including one of the last few intact rainforests in Indochina. The Cardamoms are home to 54 species listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, including the pileated gibbon (Hylobates pileatus), Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), Malayan sun bear (Helarctos malayanus), fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus), the largest known wild population of the critically endangered Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis), and Cambodia’s largest concentration of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus).
The first biodiversity survey of the Cardamom Mountains in 2000 found that although they cover just 6% of Cambodia’s land mass, they account for most of Cambodia’s large mammal species and half of Cambodia’s known bird, reptile and amphibian species. On the coast, the Cardamom Mountains connect to Peam Krasop Wildlife Sanctuary, which encompasses some of the largest remaining pristine mangrove forests in the Gulf of Thailand and part of one of four Ramsar sites in Cambodia.
As such, Gonzalez-Davidson said he was skeptical as to whether the sub-decree would really provide the promised benefits to those living in protected areas. He said environmental destruction caused by Cambodia’s cronyism seemed inevitable.
Questions arise over government’s intentions
The sudden and sizable shift in Koh Kong’s land can be traced back to July 3, 2020, when Hun Sen announced he would crack down on wealthy tycoons encroaching on protected land, particularly forested areas, which have drawn the attention of illegal logging operations nationwide. Hun Sen’s solution was to issue land titles to communities living within the protected areas, with a view to preventing unnamed tycoons from stealing parcels of forested land.
The plan was supposed to be completed within a few months, but to this day the applications for land titles in Koh Kong are still running the gauntlet of Cambodian bureaucracy. Some 10% of rural Cambodians were deemed landless in 2019, according to the World Bank, but this is down from USAID’s estimates of “between 40 and 20 percent” in 2009, and conservationists have pointed out that the 10% figure doesn’t include many communities in protected areas.
Koh Kong province stands out in Cambodia for its sheer volume of verdant greenery and an abundant, diverse range of ecosystems, biodiversity and landscapes. Roughly 90% of Koh Kong’s land enjoys protected status, with protected areas covering more than 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of the province. But as a consequence it is Koh Kong’s communities who have long come out on the losing side of land disputes. While many families are unable to acquire land titles due to the protected nature of the land they have lived on for generations, Cambodia’s wealthy and politically connected appear to have had little trouble in carving out their own concessions throughout Koh Kong.
As such, the prospect of issuing land titles to communities who live in — and in some cases help to preserve — protected areas was largely approved of by conservationists. But whether the government’s promise will come true remains to be seen.
“As most of the land across the province is part of a protected area, almost all of the land has been covered and most of the people here live in protected areas,” Sok Sothy, deputy governor of Koh Kong, said in a phone interview with reporters. “Now the government has cut parts of the land to give to them.”
Sothy added that land titles would be issued based on the land each family controls, but he would not say how a family could go about proving they control the said land.
“If people do not want their land titles, they will control their land as normal,” Sothy said. “But if they want land titles then they must submit requests to the provincial administration. This is better than previous times when people had to submit requests to both the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture.”
Sothy appeared to grow irate when asked how many families had applied for land titles so far or how many were expected to in the future, questioning why that was important. Before hanging up on reporters, he rejected the idea that land covered under the sub-decree could end up under the control of powerful tycoons, but did note that an unspecified amount of the newly converted land would be retained by the state for development.
“The provincial administration will keep the land that remains for social land concessions and for the public interest — not for investment,” he said.
In February, Sothy was quoted in the government-aligned Phnom Penh Post as saying that 30,000 families across Koh Kong would receive land titles as a result of Sub-decree No. 30, but environmentalists, land rights activists and academics alike say the actual number of families who will benefit will be much lower.
With the scale of the land being converted under Sub-decree No. 30 revealed, few remain convinced that protection of either Koh Kong’s environment or its landless communities is the driving force behind the new law.
Enriching the richest of Cambodia
Thong Chandara, who works as the Koh Kong provincial coordinator for local rights group ADHOC, said that while some of the areas listed in the sub-decree are undoubtedly populated, he has not been given any estimations for how many land titles will be issued.
“That land hasn’t been sold for investment yet, just cut from the protected areas,” he said. “Most of the people who live in Koh Kong don’t have land titles, just the rich people.”
Chandara said that while people now know how much land will be cut from the eight protected areas, the demarcation process is ongoing and none of the communities he works with are aware if they will receive a land title as a result. He added that almost 20,000 families had applied for land titles in Koh Kong as of December 2020, but he did not know how many applications had been successful or how much land each applying family would eventually receive.
“We’re worried that the process for acquiring land titles will not be transparent, as poor people still do not know about it [the ability to claim land titles] so we’re concerned it will just go to a few rich people. If the process for the land titling is not transparent, it will only serve those rich people,” he said. “We’re worried they’re conspiring with the authorities to get more land out of the sub-decree and those who are poor still get nothing.”
According to Chandara, there has been very little public information provided to families regarding the opportunity to apply for land titles, but he could not say whether this was deliberate on behalf of the authorities.
Sarah Milne, an environmental and social scientist and senior lecturer at Australian National University whose work has focused predominantly on Southeast Asia, voiced doubts over the prospect of 30,000 families being issued land titles through the sub-decree.
“These are the Koh Kong elites that you’re dealing with — Hun Sen signed the sub-decree, but there’s a lot of control rested within the provincial land management committee so there’ll be political dimensions in that,” Milne said. “The politics is always shifting, but for Hun Sen in Phnom Penh, there is always a game of keeping the tycoons happy — Ly Yong Phat mainly in this case — so it will keep the local elite in check and satisfied.”
Much of the land listed in the sub-decree overlaps with or sits adjacent to economic land concessions (ELCs) granted to some of Cambodia’s most influential businesspeople. Given the long and brutal history of land grabs, forced evictions and violence that have characterized Cambodia’s land concessions, Milne said that provincial interests could be seeking to capitalize on the new sub-decree, which could explain why the issue wasn’t dealt with via the 2008 Law on Protected Areas.
Dubbed “The King of Koh Kong,” Ly Yong Phat is regarded as one of the wealthiest men in Cambodia and has been at the center of countless land disputes across the country. Believed to hold both Thai and Cambodian citizenship, he established his business credentials with LYP Group, established in 1999, and now controls a 4,000-hectare (9,900-acre) ELC operated by his wife, Kim Heang, and daughter, Ly Arporn. His business success led him to become an economic adviser to the government in 2000, the same year he was tasked with overseeing the development of Koh Kong.
Rich in natural resources and bordering Thailand, Koh Kong’s development was both a necessity in terms of security and a lucrative opportunity, particularly for Ly Yong Phat, otherwise known by his Thai names Pad Supa or Phat Suphapha.
In 2001 he became vice chairman of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce, and by 2006 he had become a senator for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party in Koh Kong province. In the years that followed, his wealth and influence only grew, and today he is one of the most powerful individuals in Cambodia.
Leveraging the trust of Hun Sen, whose family has extensive business ties to the Ly family, his Chinese heritage and Thai connections, Ly Yong Phat’s empire rapidly spread across Cambodia, with his portfolio expanding to include Koh Kong International Airport, the 12,000-hectare (29,700-acre) Koh Kong Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and a number of sugar plantations. Many of these projects have been implicated in violent human rights abuses and are estimated to cover some 86,000 hectares (212,500 acres).
Ly Yong Phat holds a vast array of casinos, resorts, hotels, utility companies, infrastructure outfits, his own TV station, and lucrative international partnerships. Enjoying the formal protection of the Royal Cambodia Armed Forces, his investments remain secure, regardless of the social and environmental damage they leave in their wake.
Ly Yong Phat has routinely dismissed all criticisms leveled against him. Even a recent scandal in which the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group was forced to compensate more than 1,000 Cambodians who fell victim to Ly Yong Phat’s Phnom Penh Sugar Company has failed to dislodge him from his throne in Koh Kong.
But it’s not just Ly Yong Phat’s many assets that have siphoned off land from Koh Kong’s protected areas. China’s Union Development Group (UDG) has a 99-year lease on some 36,000 hectares (89,000 acres) of land across Koh Kong, mostly in Botum Sakor National Park. Deforestation rates in the park have soared in recent years, largely in connection with the Chinese developer’s actions, which eventually earned UDG a spot on the United States Treasury Department’s blacklist with the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The sanctions came as a result of human rights abuses that UDG stands accused of committing while constructing what the U.S. government has alleged could be a Chinese military facility on Cambodia’s shoreline. Both UDG and the Cambodian government have repeatedly denied this, yet it remains a sore point of contention that has seen U.S.-Cambodian relations sour since the allegations emerged in 2019.
Then there are the myriad smaller Chinese companies involved in the proposed hydropower projects, along with Cambodian businessperson Kith Meng, whose sprawling business empire, Royal Group, spans almost every sector imaginable across every province in Cambodia and who announced in August 2020 that he would be investing $1.5 billion into a 750-megawatt coal-fired power plant on 168.8 hectares (417 acres) in Botum Sakor National Park in Koh Kong province.
Neither Ly Yong Phat, UDG nor Royal Group could be reached for comment.
Further doubts emerge over government’s intentions for protected areas
“My greatest concern is for indigenous people in Koh Kong, who have inhabited their homelands for generations,” Milne said. “The government has dragged its feet for over a decade with regard to recognizing the legitimate customary land claims of people living in the Cardamoms, for example communities in Tatai Leu and Areng Valley. The sub-decree now removes their lands from the protected area system, but who will benefit? I’m not sure that the indigenous communities will win from this.”
Both Milne and Gonzalez-Davidson said that even if these communities do receive land titles, in a province fraught with the overlapping and competing interests of Cambodia’s rich and powerful, there is no guarantee that land titles issued through Sub-decree No. 30 could protect the communities from future land grabs.
“Having a land title is one thing. Holding onto your land is another,” said Milne, who noted that populist handouts, particularly in relation to land ownership, ahead of elections has been a common tactic by the Hun Sen administration.
Further undermining trust in the government’s claim that the conversion of the protected areas is a philanthropic move is the inclusion of sections of uninhabited primary forest in the sub-decree, which researchers say represent a valuable opportunity for logging operations and private development.
Neth Pheaktra, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment, repeatedly declined to comment on the criteria for selecting areas to be included in the sub-decree. But satellite imagery of Tatai Wildlife Sanctuary, which is set to lose 26,103 hectares (64,502 acres) of its 144,275-hectare (356,511-acre) area, shows sections of the protected area have been hollowed out.
Forest encroachment appears minimal, tree cover looks largely untouched, and beyond a social land concession gifted to the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces in 2011, there are only a handful of roads cutting through the verdant rainforest.
Marcus Hardtke, a veteran conservationist and expert on Cambodian forest issues, agreed that the conversion of certain areas like those in Tatai Wildlife Sanctuary seemed deeply suspicious, suggesting the move had “the signs of a massive crony land and forest grab” that could be identified by the inclusion of areas that would provide valuable opportunities to logging companies and their government backers.
“What is needed is a detailed look at the land-use and forest cover of the areas targeted, then the scam should become very obvious,” Hardtke said. “It’s Chinese companies in cahoots with regime cronies who act as middlemen … A license to print money, basically.”
Hardtke went on to praise Wildlife Alliance, a local conservation NGO involved in managing five of the eight protected areas affected by Sub-decree No. 30, saying their efforts had protected large parts of Koh Kong from these sort of incursions from tycoons and the government.
But Wildlife Alliance’s tactics in Koh Kong, while provably effective, have attracted criticism, with multiple allegations of human rights violations tarnishing the NGO’s reputation.
Wildlife Alliance did not respond to multiple requests for comments on the sub-decree, but Tim Frewer, an academic whose research has focused on Cambodian geography, said that Wildlife Alliance’s methods have repeatedly put them in conflict with communities.
“They [Wildlife Alliance] have incorporated a lot of previous logging concessions, rather than giving this degraded land to farmers and it’s these cases where the forest has already been cleared that have been contentious,” Frewer said.
He went on to note Wildlife Alliance’s tactics for conservation have at times put them at odds with the government, as well as some other NGOs, noting that rangers working for Wildlife Alliance (then WildAid) detained an ADHOC activist who was documenting conflicts between the NGO’s rangers and communities living in protected areas in 2006. Allegations of violence against those perceived by the NGO as committing forestry crimes have continued to this day, with a Wildlife Alliance team burning a villager’s tractor after they suspected it to be carrying illegally felled wood in August 2020.
Inclusion of uninhabited forest suggests land grabs imminent
Frewer said that the sub-decree could be regarded as a land grab, with Wildlife Alliance set to lose just shy of 95,000 hectares (234,800 acres) of land they currently patrol to the Koh Kong provincial administration. But he cautioned that the intentions of the sub-decree were difficult to divine due to the inclusion of uninhabited land.
“There’s some very heated land speculation going on right now, not just in Koh Kong, but across Cambodia that’s being driven by Chinese investments, there’s a much bigger demand for farming land, rubber plantations in particular,” Frewer said.
Peam Krasop Wildlife Sanctuary and Koh Kapik Ramsar Site, both of which stand to be decimated by Sub-decree No. 30, also stand out as areas of concern for conservationists. Having previously been included in a land concession to Cambodian-Chinese pulping company Green Rich Group, which won more than 60,000 hectares (148,300 acres) in a land concession in 1998, only to have it reduced to 18,300 hectares (45,200 acres) in 2003, the Ramsar site had largely been preserved until 2017. But more recent satellite imagery captured by Sentinel-2 in February 2021 shows that much more land in the area has been cleared.
The sub-decree lays out areas that now suggest additional parts of Peam Krasop and Koh Kapik will be handed over to the Koh Kong provincial administration, prompting concern from conservationists that these areas could end up in Green Rich Group’s possession, leading to more deforestation. It also raises questions as to why a largely uninhabited Ramsar site has been gutted in the past four years. Pheaktra from the Ministry of Environment again declined to comment on this issue.
“It’s clearly known that Order 01” — a previous land titling scheme launched by the government in June 2012 — “was abused by people in power to claim land and the government returned land to the state where communities had been living for more than 10 years,” said Thomas Gray, a conservation biologist with extensive experience in Cambodia.
“This recent declaration, if interpreted as it reads, is positive, but there’s a known history of these things being abused,” Gray added. “Land is the biggest issue for both conservationists and communities, as it has been for years, but the economic land concessions have been big drivers of deforestation.”
Another suspicious area included in the sub-decree is in Botum Sakor National Park, where an 800-hectare (2,000-acre) plot that sits between UDG’s land concession and Ly Yong Phat’s SEZ has been converted to state-private land, despite being uninhabited and in pristine condition in terms of tree cover.
Satellite imagery from March 2021 shows the plot’s forest is largely intact. This, coupled with the proximity of areas listed in the sub-decree to existing land concessions belonging to powerful Cambodians, garnered the attention of conservationists who say that conversion of land from state-public to state-private, especially in protected areas rich in natural resources, could be the government’s new method of land grabbing.
“I agree with Marcus [Hardtke] that the protected areas are a form of state territorialization: The re-assertion of state-public land, for land potential conversion into state-private land and concessions,” said Milne of Australian National University. “This will no doubt be an element in the current Koh Kong sub-decree [and] revenues — both licit and illicit — will go to various government officials for the issuing of land concessions.”
She said the sub-decree represents a seismic shift for land governance in Cambodia and subsequently requires much more in-depth study before conclusions can be fully drawn. But she added that the risk of abuse remains high when decision-making is steeped in such opaque measures in a country with such a long history of land theft.
“This is the natural next step,” Milne said. “It will be the new logging, the new land-grabbing — the new modality that they have to liquidate all state property into private property.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story used subjective language to describe Wildlife Alliance’s activities in Koh Kong. The story has been amended and that language removed.
Banner image of a clouded leopard by Ltshears via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Hear reporter Gerald Flynn discuss these issues further on a December 2021 episode of Mongabay’s podcast, listen here:
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