Trudging through a tangle of mangrove roots and muddy water, Taing Kry grimaced and howled as he and a partner shifted the weight of a 120-kilogram (265-pound) concrete pillar from their shoulders onto a plastic raft in the shallows of Trapang Ropov, a rundown fishing village on Cambodia’s southern coast.
“This is a tractor’s work,” Kry called, as two mates stood on a gangplank above him, smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes. “We know,” one of them spat back. “Give us $50 and we will go to the district office and change your name officially … to Mr. Tractor.”
A few miles out to sea, divers wearing weight belts over torn, ill-fitting wetsuits walked around on the seafloor stacking a previous load of pillars into a meter (3-foot) tall hexagonal structure. It’s the latest tactic to resuscitate a community fishery riled by illegal trawlers, whose weighted, often electrified, nets kill, catch or destroy everything in their path, including the very seabed habitat upon which marine life depends.
