Content Creators From Around Africa Can Now Enter The 2024 DStv…Upsides of Social Media MarketingCoastal communities in Cambodia are facing a double threat, from land and sea, as developers evict them from their homes and farms, and trawlers encroach on their nearshore fishing grounds.
This is the second part of a Mongabay series about challenges faced by Cambodia’s small-scale fishers along the coast. Read Bulldozers and trucks work on Royal Group’s international Koh Rong airport in March 2024. Screenshot from ‘Illegal fishing and land grabs push Cambodian coastal communities to the brink’ by Andy Ball / Mongabay.
The double threat, from land and sea, extends beyond Koh Rong to much of the Cambodian coastline. Illegal fishing, chiefly embodied by, 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.
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.Royal Group’s plans for Koh Rong include clearing part of the island’s protected forests to develop golf courses. Screenshot from ‘Illegal fishing and land grabs push Cambodian coastal communities to the brink’ by Andy Ball / Mongabay.
Almost all of what is publicly known about these coastal land sales has been tied to a cabal of what Reuters described as the “,” an elite segment of the population whose wealth is tied up with their political connections to the highest members of government.saw fishing communities lose out 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.
With roughly 160 km 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 calledlegal limit of 10,000 hectares