King Decries Destruction of Nation’s Forests

King Norodom Sihanouk de­cried the destruction of the na­tion’s forests in his recent monthly statement from Beijing, blaming this year’s floods and deaths on the loss of the country’s once-dense forest.

“I must only mention the fact that such deforestation is one of the major causes of the catastro­phic drought and flooding that are literally ruining our Nation, our agriculture and our villagers,” the King wrote.

“Today, we know the ultra-disastrous consequences for our nation, our agriculture, our villagers, our ‘little’ people, our lakes, our ponds, our waterways, our fisheries, of continuing, extensive deforestation, without slowing and without a true cure,” the statement read.

The King said Cambodia’s forests covered 73 percent of the nation during his reign, the time of Sangkum Reastr Niyum, from 1953 to 1970.

“It was SRN that decreed each year the ‘National Arbor Festival,’ in order to gather the national, pro­vincial, communal and urban administrations and encourage our people and foreign residents always to plant more trees, wherever they could.”

The few available statistics on forest cover in Cambodia today say 56 percent of the nation re­mains forested, according to a re­port from the Cambodian Deve­lop­ment Review.

Just 6 percent of those forests, or 625,177 hectares, are the commercially attractive category of dense evergreen, according to a CDRI study released early this year.

The statistics were gathered in 1997, however, and do not in­clude a period in the late 1990s when heavy commercial logging further depleted the forests, said Eva Galabru, country director of Glo­bal Witness, the government’s independent forestry monitor.

Some 15 commercial loggers have been placed under a moratorium since the beginning of the year as the government restructures logging practices.

The loggers are required to sub­mit plans to the Department of For­­estry and Wildlife describing how they will practice sustainable logging. Companies that don’t sub­­mit plans by Sept 30 will be kicked out of the country, ac­cording to a forestry management official.

Global Witness inspections of the forests today have found wide­spread destruction, Galabru said. “We’re having trouble finding areas that haven’t been logged,” she added.

(Additional reporting by Molly Ball)

 

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