April 7, 2003
Illegal logging feeding the international tropical wood trade is undermining the economy of Cambodia as the southeast Asian nation struggles to emerge from decades of conflict, a U.N. investigator said on Monday. Peter Leuprecht, a German law professor, said unless urgent measures were taken to control the loggers, mainly foreign firms and multinational companies, the country could become the scene of catastrophe for its some six million people.
"What we are seeing is the rapid destruction of the Cambodian forests, and the destruction of the future for generations of people, who are mainly subsistence farmers," Leuprecht told Reuters in an interview. "If it is not stopped, Cambodia will face a human and ecological tragedy." Cambodia, bordered by Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, has only recently achieved a degree of stability after bombing by the United States during the Vietnam war of the 1960s and early 1970s, the 1975-79 rule of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas who killed some one million people, Vietnamese intervention, and civil war.
The United Nations, which sponsored peace talks in the 1990s and elections which brought the present government to power, says it needs many years of peace and investment to put the shattered economy on track for development. Leuprecht said land and forest concessions granted by the government in Phnompenh to outside companies were officially for development but were in fact used for logging despite current moratoriums on cutting down trees and transporting timber.
TRUCKLOADS OF TIMBER
"Officials pretend it doesn't happen, but I have seen huge trucks loaded with illegal timber trundling along Cambodian roads. Local officials just shrugged when I asked them about it. "I have seen moonscapes in different border areas where only a short time ago there were thick forests. "This is a very profitable trade because tropical timber fetches high prices on the international market. But none of this goes back to local communities or even to the government. "Only the logging companies and their local accomplices benefit....Cambodia should not be sold out to private, corporate and foreign interests," he said.
Leuprecht is Dean of the Law Faculty at Montreal's McGill University in Canada and special representative of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan for human rights in Cambodia. He is just back from his latest visit to the country. In a report to the annual six-week session of the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission now under way in Geneva, he said the two-year-old concession programme was "a serious threat" to the people living in conceded land and forest areas.
The government, he told Reuters, was aware of the problems. "But tackling the situation seriously requires a political will which does not seem to be there. And there is stiff resistance from the groups who benefit from this." Cambodia is not yet a member of the 146-nation World Trade Organisation (WTO) based in Geneva, where there have been inconclusive discussions about a labelling system which would ensure that timber traded on global markets was legally felled.
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