baray district, Kompong Thom province – At least 119 trees have been cut in recent weeks in the vast forest concession run here by the Malaysian-based firm Grand Atlantic Timber International—an apparent violation of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s order to halt logging in forest concessions.
Global Witness officials flew over GAT’s concession area on March 31, taking photographs of cleared areas. They estimated that as many as 1,000 trees were felled in March and April within a 10-km radius.
On Wednesday, two officials from Global Witness—which has acted as the government’s independent forestry monitor since 1999—joined one forester from the Department of Forestry and Wildlife and an adviser to the Forest Crime Monitoring Unit on a walk through the area. They found more evidence of recent logging.
Security guards attempted to stop the group from entering the government-owned area.
A large log had been pulled across the road, and guards unsuccessfully tried to build an impromptu roadblock on the side of the road to keep the group’s two vehicles from passing through.
Global Witness officials Eva Galabru and Marcus Hardtke and Forest Crime Monitoring Unit chief technical adviser Patrick Lyng marked 119 freshly cut stumps during a three-hour walk on a seemingly endless maze of bulldozed roads. Other stumps were left unmarked and numerous trails were left unexplored.
Throughout the area there are discarded branches with leaves that remain green, styrofoam containers with leftover rice that looks fairly fresh, and bulldozer tire tracks unaffected by recent rains.
On top of some meter-wide stumps are piles of sawdust and pools of unhardened sap. Markings on the stumps indicated that the trees were cut by chainsaws, not axes.
“This is not the work of villagers,” Galabru said.
Henry Kong, manager of the Samling logging company and chairman of the Cambodian Timber Industry Association, said it is possible for someone to know if a tree has been cut by looking at the stump. Depending on how fresh the stump looks, it can be determined if it was cut last week, three months ago or six months ago, Kong said.
The Forestry Department official, who asked that his name not be used, said Wednesday he could not determine whether trees had been cut recently. “If it is newly cut, it could have been done by some anarchic people,” he said.
No logs were seen during Wednesday’s inspection. Hundreds of logs have been pulled out of the forest during the late afternoons and early evenings in recent weeks, according to Galabru. She said the logs were taken to a nearby GAT-operated sawmill.
The logs were cut in an area of the 150,000-hectare concession known as Coupe 4, where logging has never been officially approved by the government, Hardtke said. Coupe 4 and other areas in the concession have previously been logged illegally, according to an April 2000 Asian Development Bank-sponsored review of Cambodian forest concessions.
A number of recently cut resin trees were also found Wednesday. The trees have been used by generations of villagers who collect and sell resin, which is used in commercial products such as binding glue. Cutting resin trees is illegal, according to Global Witness.
Three laws have been broken inside the GAT concession, Hardtke said. “They’re cutting here, they’re cutting now and they’re cutting resin trees,” he said.
GAT manager Goh Chieh was due to arrive in Phnom Penh from Bangkok Thursday afternoon, a GAT official said. Several attempts to contact him by mobile telephone were unsuccessful.
Ouk Syphan, deputy director of the Forestry Department, said Thursday that no concessionaires have been given permission to log since the government moratorium went into effect Jan 1.
“If there is new cutting, the government will crack down on it immediately,” he said.
Ouk Syphan also raised the possibility that the new logging was done by “anarchic people”—not GAT—and was only done on a small scale.
Hun Sen announced the moratorium Dec 11, saying he was concerned with increasing floods and deforestation. The order requires logging concessionaires to conduct assessments of the environmental and socioeconomic impact of their activities before they can begin logging under new contracts.
A penalty for violation of the moratorium was not specified in the December government order, according to Kong.
In September 2000, Global Witness found evidence of illegal logging in another GAT concession and urged the government to cancel the concession. The Forestry Department verified the claim and took GAT to court in Koh Kong province.
The court’s ruling went against GAT, but the company was forced to pay only royalties on the logs it illegally cut, not the hefty fine that could have been imposed.
The new findings come at a time when the relationship between the government and Global Witness has deteriorated. At a government-sponsored logging conference last month, officials from the Ministry of Environment and the Forestry Department criticized Global Witness for what they said were efforts to embarrass the government by releasing damaging information.
In January 2001, Global Witness angered Hun Sen by releasing a report on illegal logging ahead of an international donors meeting. The prime minister threatened to expel Global Witness from Cambodia and discontinue its role as forestry monitor.
Global Witness and the government agreed to a new protocol in February 2001. Global Witness is now supposed to send crime reports to the Forestry Department for review, instead of releasing the results of investigations to the media.
Galabru said more than 20 crime reports have been given to the Forestry Department in the last year, and that no action has been taken against concessionaires.
“Our protocol allows us to go to the media if responses [from the government] are not satisfactory, and that has always systematically been the case,” Galabru said.
