These barges are dredging sand from the bottom of
Cambodia's largest river, the Mekong.
For two decades, Cambodian Sand has been feeding the construction
booms in Southeast Asia.
It's been exported to places like Singapore,
where more than 50 square miles of land has been
reclaimed from the sea.
Sand is the most exploited natural resource on Earth after
water,
and this kind of dredging has been blamed for riverbank
collapses and coastal erosion all over the world.
Here in Cambodia, the government is also using sand to
fill in lakes around its capital,
Phnom Penh, to create prime real estate for villas and
shopping malls.
But people who have lived and worked on these lakes
for decades now face eviction
as trucks full of sand and gravel get closer and
closer to their homes.
Around 1000 people still live on the banks of Phnom,
Penh's largest natural lake, and they're fighting to stay.
For more than 20 years,
Praxofia has lived in a house on stilts that hovers
over Bung to Mok's waters.
The government handed over parts of the lake near her
house to private developers in
2021.
Today, the wall of dirt is within 300 feet of
her dog.
Even though she and her neighbors bought their houses,
they don't have legal land titles.
This is not unusual in Cambodia,
since people couldn't officially own land until
2001. But it can leave homeowners vulnerable if the government
decides to reallocate land.
And that's exactly what happened to her whole community.
The government offered them new land if they moved to
the other side of the lake,
but Sophia wants to stay.
She spends much of her time fighting to save her
home
and has been to at least 50 protests,
including several that turned violent.
This one happened in October
2022 when authorities tried to prevent a resident from renovating
their house.
Police injured 5 people, including Sophia,
after the October protest. Sophia and her community asked the
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia to defend
their right to stay on the lake.
But the truckloads of sand keep coming.
The Cambodian government officially marked the borders of Bung to
Mok in 2016.
Two years later, it began declaring parts of the lake
private property and granting them to the country's elite.
74 acres were handed to the wife of a real
estate tycoon.
Almost 400 acres went to a wealthy senator,
and high-ranking military officials got more than 80 acres.
It's all part of a plan to turn Phnom Penh
into a world class city.
Since 2003, developers have filled in 60%
of the city's lakes. Bung Tum Pun,
a lake in the South of the city,
was once home to around 1000 families.
Now it boasts a shopping mall and expensive gated communities.
It's a glimpse of what's to come at Bung.
Tumok
Chanda lived on the lake her entire life until she
and her husband Tola were evicted in early
2022.
They asked Insider not to use their real names out
of fear for their safety.
The land they lived on was also handed to a
developer in
2021.
Chanda has seven children and also supports her widowed mother.
They paid nothing to live in their old home on
the lake and earned money by selling morning glory,
snails and fish. They used to make the equivalent of
a few $100 a week.
Now they rent a house a few 100 yards away
for
$25.00 a month
and struggle to make ends meet.
And since they were evicted,
Tola can only fish on this small part of the
Lake
Bron Penn City Hall, and the Ministry of Land Management
didn't respond to multiple requests for an interview from Insider.
The sand used to fill in Bung Tamuk comes from
places like Roka Kong,
a mining hot spot on the Mekong just 16 miles
away.
Tanruta is an activist with Mother Nature,
an environmental organization in Cambodia.
He has risked his life protesting sand mining and the
development of Bung to Mok.
Dredging in Cambodia's Lower Mekong is growing by almost 9
million tonnes a year.
But the environmental impacts can be devastating.
Riverbanks here collapsed twice in
2021.
Barges harvest more sand than the river can naturally replace,
especially since dam building projects upstream have massively reduced the
flow of sediment to the lower Mekong.
That means more erosion and increasingly unstable riverbanks.
Sand mining and reports of collateral damage happen all over
the world.
It's been blamed for homes collapsing into rivers in Vietnam.
In China, dredging nearly doubled the surface area of Poyang
Lake,
making the waterway more vulnerable to drought and threatening endangered
porpoises.
Still, river sand is highly sought after because it's perfect
for making concrete the world's most widely used building material.
Unlike the fine grains of beach or desert sand,
river sand is coarse and sharp,
which makes for a stronger concrete.
This makes it a valuable export for Cambodia,
though it's hard to trace exactly how much is sold
internationally.
UN data for the past decade shows Cambodia sent $27
million worth to countries like Singapore,
Thailand and China. But environmental rights groups like Mother Nature
say Cambodia has been exporting much more than that for
years.
Between 2008 and
2016, Cambodia declared only $5,000,000 in exports to Singapore,
but Singapore reported
$775,000,000 in imports over the same period.
Cambodia's Ministry of Mines and Energy did not respond to
requests for clarification from Insider
in Phnom Penh. The environmental impacts go beyond the rivers.
These lakes and wetlands play a key role in lessening
the impacts of floods.
Without them, Ng OS estimate
1.2 million people could face an increased risk of seasonal
flooding.
But speaking out against what's happening is dangerous.
Rota and two other environmentalists were arrested in 2020 for
protesting the filling of Bung Tamuk.
He was in jail for more than a year and
could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison
for his activism.
For Sophia, too, protecting her home is worth risking her
freedom.