As China Builds, Cambodia's Forests Fall
China's demand for natural resources is being felt in a big way in Cambodia.
Illegal logging and economic land concessions are threatening Cambodia's dwindling forests, which now echo the sound of chainsaws.
Prey Lang forest — an eight-hour journey north and east of the capital, Phnom Penh — is one of the forests where illegal loggers see money signs on the trees.
Supply And Demand
"It's just like in the United States in the 1960s, when every single redwood tree was a target for illegal logger[s]," says Suwanna Gauntlett, head of the Phnom Penh office of Wildlife Alliance. "It's the same thing in Cambodia. It's a natural resource worth a lot of money."
And many people with money — particularly China's growing middle class — are eager to spend it on luxury hardwood furniture, says Tracy Farrell of Conservation International.
"You also have the fact that other countries have been culling or reducing the extraction of their own luxury wood," Farrell says. "Thailand has been becoming much more strict about illegal wood leaking out of their country, so that puts the pressure on the countries that are less strict. ... Laos and Cambodia are really, really struggling."
Both Conservation International and Wildlife Alliance have been working with Cambodia's government to protect some forests. Those efforts have been hugely successful in slowing the rate of forest decline there, but without this protection, Gauntlett says, it would be a different case.
“ Six months — six to eight months. It'd [the forest] all be gone. It would be wiped out, believe me.