Logging mogul blasted
Logging tycoon Try Pheap has come under fire from two separate reports alleging that he is using his vast network of concessions and licences to decimate protected forests across Cambodia.
One of the reports, an exhaustive four-month investigation by a local NGO, also looked at the rapid destruction of the Snuol Wildlife Sanctuary, which a forestry official conceded yesterday had been 90 per cent deforested.
The National Resource and Wildlife Preservation Organization (NRWPO), in a letter sent to Prime Minister Hun Sen following its months-long investigation, called on the government to demarcate the borders of the country’s 30 national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
Chea Hean, the director of NRWPO, said the investigation had discovered illegal logging in every protected forest in the country.
“My team spent four months investigating, and we figured out that all the royal-decree-protected areas located throughout the country have been logged and cleared haphazardly without any interventions,” he said. …
Huge areas of formerly protected sanctuaries have been reclassified and divvied up for economic land concessions over the past several years, leaving just small areas protected. Those remaining areas, however, are increasingly threatened, according to a report released in August by the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. …
In a separate indictment of Pheap’s conglomerate yesterday, MDS Import Export Co, Ltd was accused of using an ELC to develop a special economic zone in Pursat province’s Veal Veng district as a cover to illegally buy and transport rosewood and other luxury timbers. …
A Post investigation in April found that about 60 per cent of the 75,000-hectare sanctuary’s evergreen forest had been cleared since 2009 by companies operating the 10 ELCs known to exist there. Only a fraction of the 55,135 hectares of known granted ELCs remained green in satellite images sourced from NASA. …
Phak Seangly and May Titthara
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/logging-mogul-blasted
