Cambodian National Parks being sold to the Chinese

[Chlidonias]

go to the link for the full article, its quite long so I won't post the whole thing:
Insight: China gambles on Cambodia's shrinking forests | Reuters

It was once the unspoiled jungle home for tigers, elephants, bears and gibbons. But today Botum Sakor National Park in southwest Cambodia is fast disappearing to accommodate a much less endangered species: the Chinese gambler.

"This was all forest once," says Chut Wutty, director of the Natural Resource Protection Group, an environmental watchdog based in the capital, Phnom Penh, gesturing across a near-treeless landscape.

"But then the government sold the land to rich men."

He means Tianjin Union Development Group, a real-estate company from northern China, which is transforming 340 sq km (130 sq miles) of Botum Sakor into a city-sized gambling resort for "extravagant feasting and revelry," its website says. A 64-km (40-mile) highway, now almost complete, will cut a four-lane swathe through mostly virgin forest.

National parks and wildlife sanctuaries in Cambodia, an impoverished country known for its ancient temples and genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s, could soon vanish entirely as deep-pocketed Chinese investors accelerate a secretive sell-off of protected areas to private companies, warns Chut Wutty and other activists.

The land sales also point to another trend: the expansion of Chinese economic interests in Southeast Asia's undeveloped frontiers, which comes at a delicate time as tensions simmer over China's sovereignty claims in the disputed South China Sea and the United States vows to re-engage with the region.

Last year, the Cambodian government granted so-called economic land concessions to scores of companies to develop 7,631 sq km (2,946 sq miles) of land, most of it in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, according to research by the respected Cambodia Human Rights and Development Organization

..........

Union Group has big ambitions for the area, including a network of roads, an international airport, a port for large cruise ships, two reservoirs, condominiums, hotels, hospitals, golf courses and a casino called "Angkor Wat on Sea," according to the contract and its website.

It will sink $3.8 billion into its Botum Sakor resort, a figure quoted to rights groups in February by Bun Leut, governor of coastal Koh Kong province. It covers an area almost half the size of Singapore. People in the area say it will be called either "Seven-headed Dragon" or "Hong Kong II."

"Those are just rumors. It hasn't been named yet," says Cheang Sivling, a Chinese-speaking Cambodian manager for Union Group's road-building operations.

The four-lane highway, built at a cost of about $1.1 million a mile, is part of a system of roads Union Group will run across Botum Sakor, adds Cheang Sivling.

This alarms Mathieu Pellerin, a researcher with the Cambodian human rights group Licadho, who notes that newly built roads give logging operators greater access and could accelerate the destruction of forests.

"Botum Sakor is melting away," he says.

 

[DavidBrown]

Thanks for posting the article. How do you extract quotes from the article like you have here and present them like this?

 

[Chlidonias]

use

and then the same again but with a / in front of quote in the second box, and then just cut and paste the bits you want in-between the two boxes.

The reason I always quote the articles is because on some sites the articles get deleted after a certain amount of time (or sometimes the site itself gets taken down) and then the link obviously no longer works.

 

[jay]

It's hardly suprising that a poor country such as Cambodia would see more value in selling off land rather than protecting the forest. A sad statement and a loss for everyone.

 

[nanoboy]

Ah, the march of the Chinese economic-machine is unstoppable. I have been avidly following their neo/pseudo-colonialism for the last 5 years. They are reforesting their own country, but have no qualms about ravaging any other country that will let them. Sad, sad, sad.

 

[Saola]

An update:

- Chut Wutty has been killed at a military police checkpoint. Please read about this extraordinary man:
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newma...alty-of-cambodia’s-dirty-war-to-save-forests/

- as a result of this, Cambodian president has temporarily stopped new land concessions

- the situation is not good, as many such concessions have been granted all over the country, including a 90 sq. km concession for a rubber plantation in the middle of Virachey national park in the northeast

- given the appetite of the Chinese for wildlife products, this thing in Botum Sakor will likely empty what is left of the wildlife in the Cardamom mountains, and possibly in the whole region - to say nothing of the fragmentation caused by the highway

In conclusion, the situation is bad; has been for years, wildlife trade has been flourishing in the past decades, although it has decreased lately - due to 1. both better enforcement and education projects in the countryside, and 2. diminishing wildlife populations. The kouprey, Cambodia's national animal, is extinct; tigers in Cambodia are almost if not entirely extirpated; sambar deer have decreased dramatically and so on...

- as already mentioned in the above article, Cambodian forests are now being destroyed at possibly the fastest pace in Asia, if not the world - burned and converted into plantations or farmland, or inundated by large hydroelectric projects by their "friend", always resource-hungry China...

Nevertheless, Cambodia still has plenty of wildlife compared to Vietnam or China, and a lot more good habitat than Thailand - for example, the most extensive dry forests in the region, good riverine and swamp forest habitats, the biggest population of banteng in the world, numbering in the thousands, viable numbers of gaur, elephants and Eld's deer, ibis, crane and vulture populations unparalleled in the region...see some of this in the following links, these treasures may not be around for long

WWF - World?s largest banteng population at risk in Cambodia from hunting and rapid habitat loss

WWF - Water holes work for wildlife in Cambodia's Eastern Plains landscape

http://www.wcscambodia.org/saving-w...pulations-in-the-seima-protection-forest.html

http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2010/04/giant-ibis.html

http://www.wildcambodia.net/Home.html