The second-largest town in Ratanakkiri province isn’t on most maps of Cambodia. That’s because Chum Beisrok, full of shacks, holes in the ground and ethnic Khmers and Vietnamese hoping to strike it rich, didn’t exist until two years ago.
About 15 km south of the provincial capital of Banlung, at the intersection of Lumphat, Barkeo and Banlung districts, about 2,500 people dig for gems and other valuable minerals.
The miners sleep in hammocks underneath the shells of homes still under construction or they rent space in houses recently completed. During the day, they work in groups, using hand tools to dig deep, narrow holes in search of gems and gold. Children descend into the holes and pass up buckets of dirt, which are sifted through by hand.
At the end of the day, miners sell what they have found to middlemen from Thailand and Vietnam. Many make between $2.63 and $3.94 a day. They buy what they need from the four or five small shops set up around the new homes.
Two years ago, there were just 20 people mining, according to Jeremy Ironside, a consultant to Non-Timber Forest Products, an NGO in Banlung that works with hill tribes.
But now it is a boom town.
Chum Beisrok is “like the wild west in America over 100 years ago, when there was gold,” said Dr Seshu Babu, who recently visited the area with the National Malaria Center.
While the miners in Chum Beisrok have found a short-term way to support themselves and their families, their presence illustrates a problem that has come to this remote, resource-rich province in recent years.
The increasing number of people moving to Ratanakkiri in search of work, land and money is threatening the province’s lush environment and the unique culture of the province’s indigenous hill tribes. When the province’s natural resources have been exhausted, the ability of hill tribe villagers to sustain themselves will be exhausted too, officials say.
Most of the miners, according to government and NGO officials, have come to the province in recent years from lowland provinces and Vietnam. Some of them have moved from other mining sites in Barkeo and Lumphat districts that are now tapped out. A few have even come from Pailin, the Thai border town once famous for its gems until officials declared last year that most had been mined.
Near Chum Beisrok are Tampuan hill tribe villages that traditionally depend on farmland and forests. But the sudden demand for housing near the mines has meant that many of the area’s trees—some of the best and biggest in the province, according to Ironside—are being felled for buildings.
Near the mining areas are a number of waterfalls that could be made into a tourist attraction, bringing much-needed revenue to the Tampuan villagers.
But mining has put the pristine waterfalls in danger of running an ugly red. Upstream, miners search for shiny minerals by rinsing the red soil after digging it up, sometimes using water pumps. The runoff makes its way into the stream that goes on to the waterfalls.
Ironside is trying to persuade provincial authorities to make the waterfalls and forests a protected area. Before Khmer New Year in April, his NGO hopes to set up a program in which local hill tribe villagers can sell handicrafts and charge entrance and parking fees at some of the waterfalls.
This would be modeled on a similar program Non-Timber Forest Products helped launch at Yak Loem, the volcanic lake and nature reserve near Banlung that was once a private retreat for then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk and is now a popular tourist attraction.
The provincial government formed a committee last November to oversee the miners, but there has been little regulation of their activities, according to first deputy governor Vorn Chhunly. For example, there is no requirement to rehabilitate the land by filling in the holes after the digging and mining is finished, he said.
There has been small-scale mining in the province for years, even among hill tribe members, according to Vorn Chhunly.
But now that Cambodia has achieved peace for the first time in decades and is developing a market economy, the province is facing increasing pressure as more people try to make money from mining.
Ironside is trying to get provincial officials to look ahead to a time when the gems have been completely mined.
“Now, everyone is busy making money with gems,” he said. “But what happens when the gems run out?”
Until recently, gems and timber were lucrative sources of income in Pailin, the former Khmer Rouge stronghold in the northwest. But when the gems ran out, so did the Thai companies that had poured millions of dollars into the area during the early 1990s, helping to fund the Khmer Rouge insurgency.
Now, most people in the town are still poor, according to Mai Meak, chief of cabinet for Pailin municipality.
“Pailin should be an example for other provinces who have mines,” he said. “Mining did not help to improve the living conditions for our people.”
Pailin second Deputy Governor Keut Sothea has said the gem-mining companies caused serious environmental damage to the area, particularly by polluting water sources.
There are no private companies mining in Ratanakkiri now, and few of the individual miners in the province use any sort of machinery in their mining. Nonetheless, “there is no environmental protection at all” from mining in the province, said Pen Bonnar, the Ratanakkiri coordinator for human rights group Adhoc.
But the days when most mining in Ratanakkiri is done by individuals could soon be over.
Khun Panhasith, director of the office of development of mine resources at the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy, said the government agreed in 1997 to allow Jupiter Resources International Cambodia, a private Canadian company, to begin studying the province’s mining potential.
A draft law approved by the Council of Ministers in March 2000 and now awaiting consideration by the National Assembly would designate gems a government-owned natural resource, according to Sok Leng, director of the Department of Mines at the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy.
The law would allow the government to negotiate deals with private companies and combat unregulated mining by imposing large fines on unlicensed miners.
But Jupiter doesn’t want others to interfere with its work and recently complained to ministry and provincial officials about individual miners working in Ratanakkiri, said Nao Sothy, the administration director for Jupiter.
Khun Panhasith said the ministry has not given permission to any individuals to do mining in Chum Beisrok. Only provincial officials have allowed this to happen, he said
“The ministry plans to stop this illegal activity,” he said.
