Event
Fieldwork in the Central Cardamom Protected Forests (CCPF) of Cambodia.
Long Sarou is Cambodian visiting researcher in the Center of Non-Traditional Security (NTS) of RSIS. He spent his time for fieldwork in the villages of the Central Cardamom Protected Forests (CCPF), because he is currently doing research on “Livelihood Strategies Amongst Indigenous Peoples in CCPF, Cambodia”. The main objective of the study is to determine and emphasize on the various interventions and interactions such as the government –natural resource management policies, NGOs, and the external actors, which effect to livelihoods of indigenous peoples. The report will be done and published by the end of this year.
The study is focused on Thmor Doun Pov and Tatei Leu, as these are small communities scattered in the CCPF, where most of indigenous peoples located in these 2 communes. The indigenous peoples in Thmor Doun Pov and Tatei Leu communes of Thmor Bang district of Koh Kong province, like so many other small indigenous communities in Cambodia, have been suffering a series of significant changes, particularly concerning with their livelihood improvement. Their natural resource based livelihoods are being challenged by chain effects including governmental policy, social, cultural, and ideological aspects.
The indigenous people in CCPF have not well understood why their areas have become as protected areas. At the beginning, the process of changes has not been well informed and clearly explained to them. It is very important that the major stakeholders and other interventions such as government – Forestry Administration (FA) and NGOs involving with them need to be identified about their roles and duties within the indigenous mountain of CCPF, and these interventions must require much participation and understanding from them. In addition, keeping external actors (migrants or other investment development) informed is very important, because many external actors arriving from other places into CCPF, they are ignorable and unaware of the existence of the protected area management system, so that these external actors are taking more advantages to extract the natural resources than indigenous peoples. These all problems have been happened within the CCPF these days, and these can be led to the challenges and impacts to the livelihood strategies amongst indigenous people in the CCPF. Therefore, it is very interesting to ask what are the challenges and impacts to indigenous peoples’ livelihoods concerning to these different interventions and polices? To answer that more discussion and elaboration will be explored in the report study.
Pictures courtesy of Long Sarou