Official Retracts Comments About Logging in Wildlife Sanctuary
A district-level Environment Ministry official on Thursday retracted comments he made last week when he claimed proper monitoring of logging inside Ratanakkiri province’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary was impossible because his ministry did not know the boundaries of private land concessions in the protected zone. On November 20, Chou Sopheak, director of Lumphat district’s environment department, said the boundaries of economic land concessions (ELCs) in the sanctuary were not marked and environment officials did not have maps to indicate the exact size and location of the privately held tracts. “It’s difficult to say whether or not a company is logging outside its ELC because there are no marked boundaries to show the extent of the company’s land…. So if they are cutting down trees outside their ELCs, we wouldn’t know,” Mr. Sopheak said last week. But in a letter Thursday, Mr. Sopheak contradicted his previous claims, saying that only the borders of Daun Penh Agrico are unmarked, adding that environment officials did have a map of the concession. “[T]he boundaries of Daun Penh Agrico Co. Ltd.’s land concession are not completely marked yet, so accusing the company of logging outside its land concession is not necessarily accurate,” he wrote in the letter. …
Aun Pheap and Ben Wood
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/official-retracts-comments-about-logging-in-wildlife-sanctuary-48211/
