Picking up the scraps

As logging changes M’kiri, Phnong reaping only meagre gains from major loss

THEY arrive in a cloud of exhaust, tyres slick with mud from yesterday’s rain. In front of an abandoned police checkpoint, deep in the jungle near the Vietnamese border, six men in their teens and 20s light cigarettes and take swigs of water as they look over their motorbikes.

Traffic on this hellish road picks up around 8 in the morning each day. Today they pass several other villagers with chainsaws and machetes, and two soldiers who do not seem to notice the tree stumps littering the road of this wildlife sanctuary.

Khoeun*, 26, a Phnong villager who lives in a wooden hut a few kilometres from the edge of the forest, overlooking banana and pepper plantations, checks his motorcycle with the precision of a captain examining his vessel: retying knots, distributing weight, securing his machete and bottle of gasoline.

“We cut small things,” Khoeun explains. “We have no farm, and it’s difficult. Most of the stuff has already been cleared, and we collect the leftovers.”

“I don’t want to do this,” he adds. “But if I don’t, someone else will.”

Driven by desperation, overturning generations of tradition, Khoeun and scores of other villagers in this area of Mondulkiri have turned away from traditional farming and towards the illegal timber trade. Environmentalists say they have watched with growing concern as the province – still Cambodia’s least populated and most densely forested – has seen its wealth stripped, sucked and mined from the

DAPHNE CHEN The 1-year-old daughter of Theun Soknay, an environmental ranger who was shot and killed during a routine forest patrol in January, plays at her house in Mondulkiri’s Sen Monorom commune.