News

A provincial military police commander was named yesterday by a major conservationist group as the alleged owner of a huge haul of illegal rosewood confiscated in Kampong Speu province this week. At around 3 a.m. on Tuesday, Wildlife Alliance rangers intercepted a truck carrying 12.5 cubic ...

The government reforested 80,693 hectares of land between 2008 and 2012 as part of its efforts to combat deforestation, a recent agriculture ministry report says, but these seemingly impressive statistics were reached by counting rubber trees and other agricultural crops as adequate replacements for forests. The ...

An environmental protection NGO is preparing to file a lawsuit with the Kampong Speu provincial court and a complaint with the Anti-Corruption Unit against an Agriculture Department official who was allegedly paid by a development firm to issue land titles to villagers squatting on state ...

A Vietnamese company has been transporting thousands of dollars’ worth of illegally logged luxury timber from Kratie’s Snuol district to Vietnam on a nightly basis under the nose of authorities, an environmental protection NGO said yesterday. At least 10 trucks with an estimated five cubic metres of ...

About 300 cubic metres of luxury timber is being felled every day and transported on boats to Vietnam and Thailand from four districts in Koh Kong province, according to an investigation by a local rights group. Chea Hean, director of the Natural Resource and Wildlife Preservation ...

Three staff members of a local NGO that campaigns against resource exploitation were charged yesterday with extorting money from loggers in Stung Treng province. The three staffers from the Natural Resource and Wildlife Preservation Organization (NRWPO) stand accused of extorting groups of loggers out of at ...

Local communities that lost their land via economic land concessions to private companies are now being paid by those same firms to illegally fell the trees that once sustained their livelihoods, a group of five advocacy groups contended yesterday. At a press conference, the NGOs singled ...

Logging tycoon Try Pheap’s rapidly expanding land empire, criticised by rights groups for displacing families and encroaching on protected forest areas, has grown to almost 70,000 hectares in size and is helping to facilitate a cross-border illegal logging operation, a report released today alleges. The Cambodian ...

Provincial military police confiscated three tractors transporting three metres of luxury wood and two circular saws travelling out of Kampong Speu’s protected Phnom Oral Wildlife Sanctuary yesterday. Chea Hean, director of Natural Resource and Wildlife Preservation Organisation (NRWPO), arrived to investigate illegal logging in the sanctuary ...

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 ...

Anti-logging activists wrote to the United Nations yesterday to call for the monitoring of a lawsuit in which they accuse hundreds of officials in Kampong Speu province’s Phnom Oral Wildlife Sanctuary of illegal deforestation. The Natural Resource and Wildlife Preservation Organization (NRWPO) listed 241 officials it ...