FWD: Vanishing ‘Lost World’?

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This article is from The Star Online (http://thestar.com.my)

URL:

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2003/9/30/features/6317528 & sec=f\

eatures

 

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Tuesday September 30, 2003

Vanishing ‘Lost World’?

By ED CROPLEY

 

SVAY Sim says he sees more and more rare animals these days, and that’s bad

news. For the 66-year-old village elder, the appearance of the tigers and

sunbears which normally lurk in the depths of Cambodia’s “Lost World” Cardamom

mountains is a sure sign that the ancestral forest spirits are stirring.

 

“Some people forget the traditional beliefs and that forces the animals to come

to the village,” he says, gazing out from his humble wooden hut towards the

towering wall of trees encircling the tiny community.

 

“There are tigers and sunbears but they only come to the village when people do

something wrong, like cut down the trees to make a farm in a place where the

spirits have their home.”

 

Spirits or no spirits, it is clear that forces alien to the ancient forest are

at work around the village of Thma Bang nestled in an expanse of primaeval

jungle covering nearly two million hectares of southwest Cambodia.

 

In the middle distance, the growl of a chain-saw and the low rumble of

caterpillar tracks mingle with the screeches of monkeys and birds as mankind

makes inroads into the pristine wilderness.

 

It is difficult to ascribe any credit to Pol Pot, the ultra-Maoist guerrilla

leader whose “back to the land” agrarian revolution in the 1970s led to the

genocide of the “Killing Fields”, in which about 1.7 million people are believed

to have died.

 

Thanks to the Khmer Rouge’s four bloody years in charge and the years of civil

war that followed their removal by Vietnamese troops in 1979, Cambodia is one of

the most destitute countries in South-East Asia.

 

But it is also virtually unique in a region where rampant economic growth in

the 1980s and 1990s – the rise of the so-called “Asian tigers” – put paid to

nearly all virgin forests and, by extension, many of the animals living in them.

 

Official statistics are hard to find but most estimates say up to 40% of

Cambodia is still carpeted in untouched forest, a potential treasure trove of

undiscovered birds, beasts and plants.

 

And the reason? Those decades of war.

 

“Thirty years of conflict have effectively buffered the country from resource

exploitation,” says Anthony Simms of Washington-based Conservation

International.

 

Landmines and unexploded bombs still litter swathes of the country, especially

the dense forests along the border with Thailand where Pol Pot’s dwindling

forces held out until the end of 1998. But as fighting tapered off after a 1991

peace deal, the logging firms rumbled in and Cambodia’s trees started to fall.

 

“During the war, the military were exploiting the forest a bit, but the large

outside companies, the ones with the big machines which can rip out the trees

very quickly, weren’t in there until the 1990s,” said Simms.

 

The government has banned commercial logging, which has halted large-scale

felling but for frequent abuses recorded by monitor groups in a country not

renowned for its law enforcement.

 

The challenge now is to preserve the Cardamoms, a final redoubt for weird and

wonderful beasts such as the pileated gibbon or Siamese crocodile, while at the

same time catering for the very pressing needs of Cambodia’s 13 million people.

 

The recent history of Thma Bang illustrates the problem: evacuated in 1979 by

the Vietnamese to eradicate potential support for the Khmer Rouge, it remained

empty for 18 years until refugees such as Svay Sim were allowed to come home.

 

But along with those returning refugees, most of them indigenous forest people,

came the road, then the hunters and then the bulldozers of a well-connected

local bigwig with plans to transform tracts of the protected forest into a fruit

farm.

 

Conservation groups are up in arms over the farm, which they say will make one

fast buck in the short-term but destroy many more in the future as Cambodia

develops what many see as southeast Asia’s “Jurassic Park” to high-value

ecotourism.

 

“We are not talking 50 years’ time. In 10 to 20 years, people will be prepared

to pay a lot of money for the ‘real wilderness’ experience you get down there,”

said Simms.

 

Poverty too is piling on pressure in an area where people earn just US$10

(RM38) a month from farming – but can bag US$5,000 (RM19,000) for a tiger.

Fortunately, some determined Cambodians are lining up with the conservationists

against the chain-saws, bulldozers and hunters’ rifles.

 

“We must keep the forest safe,” said forest ranger Thab Savy. “I have never

seen a tiger, but hopefully my children or their children will have better

luck.” – Reuters

 

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