Cambodia will claw poachers

BANGKOK, Jan 23 (IPS) - A regional wildlife body is aiming to spread its net wide to trap poachers and illegal loggers, now that a section of Cambodia's nature crime investigators have been armed with new legal tools. A week-long training programme held at Sihanoukville, the main beach resort in that South-east Asian nation, was geared to plug a gap that has long helped major wildlife criminals to get away -- investigations that were too weak to build legal cases.

''Prosecution has always been a problem in Cambodia. There have been very few successful cases,'' Steven Galster, director of field operations at WildAid, the global conservation lobby, told IPS from the site of the training, which ended Tuesday. ‘'We have trained them to set up long-term investigations and to build strong cases to catch the criminals.'' The skills that the 31 Cambodian officers from agencies like the police, the forest department and the customs have acquired are part of a drive by the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN) to mount a counter offensive against the region's illegal wildlife trade, a multimillion-dollar industry. ASEAN, which stands for the Association of South-east Asian Nations, is a 10-member bloc that includes Brunei, Burma (or Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. ASEAN-WEN was set up in December 2005.

The need to save Cambodia's wildlife is best captured in the fate of one of its prized predators, the tiger, which is on the verge of extinction. WildAid has also documented other species that have been targeted by poachers, such as pythons, elongated tortoise and pangolins. Other conservation groups like TRAFFIC, the global wildlife trade monitoring network, say that Cambodia's bears, monitor lizards, crocodiles and macaques are as vulnerable to the claws of the poachers. Cambodia's wildlife has become increasingly in demand as ‘'stocks run dry in Vietnam,'' James Compton, TRAFFIC's South-east Asia regional director, said in an interview.

The growing demand from Vietnam and China, neighbouring countries which have been enjoying a long spell of rapid economic growth, has seen the demand for wildlife and wildlife products rise, he said. ‘'(They are used) for traditional medicine, wild meat, pets and private zoos.'' TRAFFIC recently noticed Vietnamese traders on the Vietnam-Cambodian border ‘'commissioning Cambodian poachers to hunt a shopping list of wildlife species,'' Compton revealed. ‘'Wildlife trade is very lucrative and is therefore attracting the business and entrepreneurial community who stand to gain significantly from this trade.''

A study by the World Bank in 2005 offers a glimpse at the profits involved. The wildlife trade in Vietnam in 2002 was estimated at 66.5 million US dollars, the Bank noted in ‘Going, Going, Gone: The Illegal Trade in Wildlife in East Asia and Southeast Asia.' In Indonesia, the study added, an average of over 50 tigers were killed every year from 1998 to 2002. Cambodia's wildlife had been part of this supply chain in the 1970s, too, when the country, caught in a bloody civil war and drawn into the war in Vietnam, came under the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. ‘'By the late 1970s, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge had traded 25 million dollars worth of wild animal parts to the Chinese for weapons and supplies,'' adds the Bank's study. And as Cambodia's small team of rangers working in the country's pristine forests well know, trying to fight the poachers or illegal loggers comes with a high risk, including being attacked by poachers.

In September 2005, for instance, two forest rangers were killed by loggers along the boundary of the Phnom Aurual Wildlife Sanctuary, which lies east of Phnom Penh. A daunting challenge, says the London-based environmental group Global Witness, is one posed by the corruption linked to highly-placed government officials thriving on the illegal logging trade, which has severely depleted the forests. ‘'Wherever there is a forest in Cambodia, there is illegal logging,'' Jon Buckrell, forest policy coordinator at Global Witness, told IPS. ‘'It goes hand-in-hand with systemic corruption. Illegal logging is the preserve of the powerful and well connected -- if you are a poor farmer you cannot simply walk into a forest and start cutting down valuable trees.''

Recent policy decisions by Phnom Penh are expected to worsen this environment, Buckrell said, pointing to new economic land concessions granted ‘'to create plantations'' in natural forest areas. ‘'These permits are illegal and designed to provide a pretext for companies to undertake clear-cutting operations and sell the timber.'' Cambodia's loss of an estimated 2.5 million hectares of forest cover between 1990 and 2005 has even alarmed the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Troubled by the rampant scale of illegal logging in the 1990s, the IMF cancelled a 120 million US-dollar loan. Galster, of WildAid, concedes that corruption will be an issue for the newly trained nature crime investigators, ‘'Corruption is an issue, but half the problem is the lack of skills to deal with the major criminals.''