(March 26, 2008) Indigenous farmers and forests are threatened by one of at least four Chinese-funded hydropower projects approved by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen over the last two years, Reuters reported on March 26.
The Chay Areng project in the Cardamom mountains is part of a $3 billion scheme aided by China to boost the country’s power output from 300 MW today to 1,000 MW in a decade.

China Southern Power Grid Company (CSG), one of China’s two state grid operators, signed an agreement in 2006 to build the 260 MW plant at an estimated cost of $200 million and with a completion date of 2015.

While officials claim CSG’s Chay Areng project is designed to accelerate rural development, villagers only learned about the project this year when Chinese engineers turned up to start working on feasibility studies—details of which CSG and the government are reluctant to discuss, Reuters reports.

Members of the indigenous communities living off the forests in the Cardamom mountains are likely to pay the biggest price and don’t want to move.

“We have been living here without a dam for many generations. We don’t want to see our ancestral lands stolen,” says 78-year-old resident Sok Nuon in an interview with Reuters. “I do not want to move as it takes years for fruit trees to produce crops. By then, I’ll be dead.”

Environmentalists say the dam’s 110-square kilometre lake will displace thousands of indigenous people in nine villages.

According to NGO Forum on Cambodia, the delicate ecosystem of the flooded forest downstream, which is home to some of the world’s rarest turtle species as well as hundreds of types of migratory fish, would also be hit by disruptions to water flow caused by the dam’s operations.

March 26, 2008