Minority Groups Stand Up For Rights To Land And Natural Resources In Cambodia

In Cambodia’s northern-most province of Ratanakiri, Sap Lan shows visitors her rice field. The indigenous Kavet woman says that normally by this time the plants are up to her waist. Late rainfall in 2010 meant her rice plants barely reached her ankle. She  counted on harvesting wild fruits and vegetables from the surrounding forest for food and to earn money to buy rice.

To support the 11 people, all Lan’s extended family, living in one small house near their 2.5-acre rice field, she depends heavily on nature, especially rain and forest resources.  Last year they made up for a dry growing season and a shortfall in rice production by gathering the fruit from samrong trees. In some places people can pay $10 for a kilo of samrong fruit. The family earned enough to buy a motorcycle and fix up their house.

The struggle for survival here may become even more challenging: The family is hearing that a mining company is exploring for minerals in the area and that the company has a 20,500-acre concession from the government, granted without consultation or permission from the local people in the village of Lalai, on the edge of a large stream flowing into the Se San river, a tributary of the mighty Mekong.

“If a mine comes here, it will affect Lalai, and the pigs and cows I raise, and we won’t have land to live on,” one man in the village tells us.

Farmers grow corn and vegetables on small fields in the forest and are accustomed to rotating their fields every few years. They need enough land to continue this traditional approach to agriculture.

Indigenous communities in Ratanakiri including the Kavet may be deprived of their agricultural land, and the forest on which they depend for their survival. This has been their home for centuries.

Chanthy Dam, a human rights defender in her 50's, runs a non-profit advocacy group called the Highlander Association that works with the minority hill peoples here and helps them understand their rights, and defend their land and natural resources.

“Cambodia’s 2001 Land Law protects the rights of indigenous people to sustainably harvest forest products and live on their ancestral lands,” she says sitting next to Lalai’s village chief. “They have the right to manage their lands.

“And no authority has the right to take away the ancestral lands of indigenous people.”

Indigenous women such as Chanthy are taking the lead in the defense of their rights and the protection of indigenous culture and the environment.

However, the heroic work of these groups, like the Highlander Association, will be hampered if the Cambodian government decides to pass the “Law on Associations and NGOs.” The democratic space in Cambodia is shrinking as the opposition has been languished; civil society organizations are on constant threat of being silenced with the government's attempt to pass the controversial draft NGO Law.

Without proper consultation with NGOs the most recent draft is moving forward and could become law any time within the next few months. If adopted, the impending NGO law could be used to crack down on civil society groups and citizen participation such as indigenous groups that Chanthy is helping to build.  

Farmer groups would be unable to assemble and press for resource rights such as land or water, and groups raising awareness of basic human rights in the areas of mining and illegal land eviction, workers rights, and state corruption would all be at risk. Oxfam is calling on the Cambodian government to abandon this law to restrict civil society voices.

Chanthy Dam is helping people to use peaceful means to solve problems. She continues organizing villagers, training them in their basic rights to defend their communal lands. We’ll be writing more about her in the coming weeks and months. “We are not hopeless,” she says. “There are ways of protecting our way of life.”

By Victoria Marzilli, New Media Specialist at Oxfam America.