Forest type: Tropical
Geographic location: Cambodia
Threat: Illegal logging for export to Vietnam. Outside protected areas, most of the province is already under concession to foreign logging companies.
At risk: Resident minority groups, already evicted from other areas by logging companies. Rice farming and local fishing here and elsewhere in the Mekong River watershed. Kouprey and other highly endangered species.
Cambodia offers an interesting parallel to the situation in Burma. Forest cover in Cambodia has fallen from 75 percent in the early 1970s to less than 35 percent today. Most of this forest loss is due to illegal, but officially sanctioned, logging by the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces and the Khmer Rouge. After Burma, Cambodia is the second-largest exporter of illegal logs to Thailand. These timber revenues have been used to finance arms procurement by both the Cambodian Armed Forces and the Khmer Rouge forces based along the Thai border. The illegal timber trade with Thailand earned the Khmer Rouge an estimated $10 million a month in 1992.
In November 1995, Cambodia's two prime ministers secretly granted concessions covering 6.3 million hectares of forest -- three times the area that can support commercial logging -- to 30, mainly foreign, logging companies. Seven of the companies received tax breaks for exports and profits. The revenues from these operations almost entirely bypass the national budget and represent an absolute loss to the country of at least $117 million for the period January 1996 to March 1997. Following the collapse of the Khmer Rouge in 1996, and until the coup d'etat in July 1997, these revenues helped finance the campaigns of the co-prime ministers for the elections scheduled in November 1998. The coup was provoked in part by the import of weapons purchased using illegal timber revenues.
Source: Global Witness, 1997; Brandon and Kishor, 1994; Talbott, 1998.