“I wish they’d stop burning our things.” A simple request to Wildlife Alliance from a villager living in the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project in Cambodia
“I wish they’d stop burning our things.” A simple request to Wildlife Alliance from a villager living in the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project in Cambodia
Reporting from SourceMaterial, Southeast Asia Globe, and Süddeutsche Zeitung reveals a series of clashes between villagers and Wildlife Alliance rangers
Wildlife Alliance, a US organisation, burns the homes of some of the poorest people on the planet in the name of conservation in Cambodia.
Wildlife Alliance runs the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project which generates carbon credits that are sold to corporations such as Bayer, Boeing, Deliveroo, Gucci, Stella McCartney, Delta Air Lines, Interface Inc., McKinsey and many more.
The project has sold more than 28.6 million carbon credits since the first credits were issued in December 2018.
In a statement about the REDD projects that Gucci has bought credits from, the company claims that,
The project successfully integrates conservation and sustainable development; communities are empowered to develop business at the same time as protecting the forest and biodiversity.
In May 2023, Gucci quietly removed claims about being carbon neutral from its website, and told The Guardian that it is no longer working with carbon trading company South Pole.
That followed an investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial into REDD credits certified by the Washington DC-based carbon standards setting organisation Verra. The investigation found that “94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate”.
Southern Cardamom REDD+ project suspended
In June 2023, Verra suspended the Southern Cardamom project after receiving what it described as “stakeholder comments” about the project.
The comments came from Human Rights Watch which started investigating the allegations of human rights abuses associated with the project in April 2022.
Human Rights Watch’s letter to Verra accuses Wildlife Alliance of failing to carry out a proper process of free, prior and informed consent with local communities before the project started. In a statement to SourceMaterial, Wildlife Alliance denied this, stating that, the project “is a responsible and effective conservation initiative that benefits both the environment and the local community”.
This week, research by SourceMaterial, Southeast Asia Globe, and Süddeutsche Zeitung reveals that while some villagers support the project’s aims, a series of clashes has taken place between villagers and rangers at the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project.
A motorbike chase
In 2021, rangers arrested Meng Sotear, a 62-year-old rice and cashew farmer. She was tending her rice farm when the armed rangers appeared.
She was ordered onto a motorbike and taken towards the ranger’s headquarters 10 kilometres away.
At the time, a wedding was taken place in Meng’s village. The local chief, Huang Pou, stopped the festivities. He jumped on his motorbike, and along with about 40 other wedding guests, intercepted the rangers before they arrived at the headquarters.
The confrontation resulted in Meng being freed.
Meng practices rotational swidden cultivation, farming an area for two or three years until the soil fertility declines. Then she moves on to a new plot, returning two or three years later by which time the soil has recovered.
Meng told SourceMaterial that the area where she was arrested was communal. It was used by many families in the village. She had been farming there for 20 years and no one had told her she couldn’t farm there.
After the failed arrest, rangers destroyed the farmed area. Meng is left with just one plot of land, behind her house. She worries that the rangers will return.
“Hard to survive”
Younger farmers told SourceMaterial that the Wildlife Alliance rangers are “like tigers”. The farmers run whenever they see them.
Out of fear and confusion, many farmers no longer rotate their farm plots. Their crops have suffered as a result.
Sen Voleak, a fisherman’s wife, lives in Chi Phat in the Southern Cardamom mountains. Her family lives in a two room hut with one light bulb powered by a car battery. SourceMaterial reports that she told them that “the heavy-handed tactics of Wildlife Alliance’s rangers are making it hard to survive”.
“It’s difficult enough for us to make a living,” she said. “I wish they’d stop burning our things.”
Sok Sal is a farmer in the village of Toap Khley. He told SourceMaterial that rangers destroyed his farm. He ran away before they could arrest him.
Wildlife Alliance allows farmers in certain areas. But none of the people that SourceMaterial spoke to during a four-day visit to the Southern Cardamom project area could identify the boundaries of this permitted area.
Villagers cut trees to build their homes. “I live in a forest,” Ourn Vorng told SourceMaterial. “Of course my house is made of wood.”
In 2004, when Wildlife Alliance established the nature reserve that is now the REDD project, the organisation persuaded families to move to a new settlement called Sovanna Baitong, about 10 kilometres away. Wildlife Alliance promised the families that moved that they would be given land titles in return for moving.
Wildlife Alliance built a well at one end of the village, but some villagers told SourceMaterial they don’t have easy access to clean water. Others complained that they have still haven’t received land titles.
One of the villagers, Leang Yoeurn said,
“We feel as if we’re living on a boat in the middle of a lake. We feel it can be taken from us at any time.”
“We have no place to go”
Wildlife Alliance rangers, together with Environment Ministry officials and military police, have also destroyed crops and homes in an area outside the REDD project, to the north of the Cardamom National Park.
Recently CamboJA News reported from Knong Riel where villagers are using land now classified as protected conservation area. One woman told CamboJA News that,
“We are so scared living here, but we have no place to go. We do not really have enough time to plant the crop because most of the time we run into the forest to escape from the officials. If they see us, they arrest us.”
In a two year period from 2019 to 2021, Environment Ministry, military police, and Wildlife Alliance rangers demolished and sometimes burned more than 55 structures at Knong Riel. Farmers say these were their permanent homes.
They also evicted more than 86 families. One villager told CamboJA News how his four-year-old daughter had cried as a team of rangers, including a foreigner working for Wildlife Alliance, destroyed their home in 2020.
He told CamboJA News that, “They told us about a week before to leave, but we didn’t have anywhere to go because we don’t have any land.”
He and his wife still farm the land. They sleep on wooden planks under a plastic sheet with their two daughters. Ranger patrols have repeatedly burned their shelter down.