In Cambodia, Indigenous villagers lose forest & land amid carbon offset project

This is the second article in our two-part series on Indigenous land rights and the Keo Seima REDD+ project. This series was co-written by a Cambodian journalist whose name is being withheld due to security concerns. Read part one here.

Greung Bpel hacked at a wall of grass alongside the dirt road leading away from her village, and pointed toward where she had once farmed.

A member of an Indigenous ethnic Bunong community, the elderly Bpel lives in the village of Pu Kong deep inside the 292,690-hectare (723,250-acre) Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, much of it part of a leading carbon offset initiative, in northeastern Cambodia’s Mondulkiri province.

Last year, Bpel said, after she went into debt and worked for months to prepare a plot for farming, rangers from Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment demanded around $60 in extortion because she was using land without permission inside a protected area.

At the time, the plot Bpel had been blocked from using was intended for her village’s communal ownership, according to measures put in place by the Cambodian government with support from the Keo Seima REDD+ project. And yet contradictory directives from the government and the REDD+ project are to this day preventing Bpel and her community from actually gaining ownership and exercising control over significant portions of their traditional land.

Bpel’s family barely grew enough rice to feed themselves, and when she could not come up with the extortion money, government rangers and military police confiscated her motorbike and grass cutter, uprooted her cassava crops and slashed her banana trees to stumps, Bpel and local authorities recalled.

“I didn’t have the money so they wouldn’t let me do it,” Bpel said. “I did it for my grandkids. I am so angry.”

Over the course of nearly three weeks of on-the-ground reporting in Keo Seima, Mongabay spoke with more than 70 Bunong farmers and community leaders, many of whom echoed Bpel’s frustrations.

Mongabay’s two-part investigation into Keo Seima found that the laws and policies intended to secure Indigenous land rights and ownership have often meant little in practice for Pu Kong and other Bunong villages, nor have they prevented significant deforestation and the dispossession of thousands of hectares of Indigenous lands in the REDD+ project.

While generally supportive of the aims of the REDD+ project,  Bunong villagers said they often felt their communities had been unfairly restricted in their ability to earn a living in Keo Seima without receiving viable alternatives or secure land rights. They face imprisonment and other legal consequences due to the insufficient land granted to their communities and opaque, often contradictory, policies over where they can farm – allegations explored extensively in part one of the investigation.

Part two focuses on how these issues affect Pu Kong. It’s one of 20 primarily Indigenous Bunong communities partnered with the Keo Seima REDD+ project, which launched in 2010 and is run by Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment and New York-based nonprofit the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). REDD+, which stands for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries,” allows corporations and individuals to offset their carbon emissions by paying to preserve forest in places like Keo Seima.

Across Keo Seima, Indigenous peoples, including in Pu Kong, said the REDD+ project has in some ways greatly benefited their communities, especially with infrastructure improvements funded by just over $1 million channeled from the sale of carbon credits since 2018. The project’s claims to benefit communities have likely led to increased market value for its carbon credits based on certifications awarded by the world’s leading carbon credit standard setter, Verra, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.

Verra’s Climate, Community & Biodiversity Standards (CCB) verify that the Keo Seima REDD+ project “recognizes, respects and supports rights to lands, territories and resources, including the statutory and customary rights of Indigenous Peoples and others.”

Yet after more than a decade, the REDD+ project has failed to deliver a core commitment to some communities like Pu Kong: their communal land titles. This form of collective land ownership, uniquely available to Indigenous communities, encompasses the village’s residential homes, farmland, culturally significant forests and reserve forests for the use of future generations.

In the case of Pu Kong, the village has been unable to receive its communal land title in part due to a forest protection area established by the REDD+ project, while community leaders there say they have recently been pressured by government officials to forfeit an application to receive ownership over a significant portion of their traditional lands.

“We do not have enough land to do cultivation,” said Bouy Nahanh, the WCS-funded REDD+ representative of Pu Kong village. “The Ministry of Environment said it is under their control, and thus we cannot do that. Before, old farms had been cultivated for generations. And the Ministry of Environment came here after the indigenous people.”

In a lengthy response to Mongabay, WCS acknowledged that Indigenous communities like Pu Kong may not be able to receive ownership over all their traditional lands in the REDD+ project. WCS said the REDD+ project has still improved life overall for these communities and seeks to maintain their access to customary farmlands. A range of officials with the Ministry of Environment, including Minister Eang Sophalleth and the under-secretary of state, Paris Chuop, who oversees Cambodia’s REDD+ projects, did not respond to requests for comment.

Verra said Mongabay’s findings “differ dramatically” from the reports prepared by its approved auditors and that, without assuming wrongdoing, it would review the issues further.

A major land dispute linked to the project

At a table outside her modest wooden home, Greung Bpel spread out the decades’ worth of documents tracing Pu Kong village’s still unsuccessful effort to obtain a communal land title, which she and her husband have helped lead since the process began in 2008.

Communal land titles were intended to both protect Indigenous forests and communities’ traditions of shifting agriculture, which involves letting some plots of farmland lie fallow for years at a time to regenerate soil fertility. A 2004 map prepared by a local NGO identified more than 14,000 hectares (34,600 acres) of customary lands belonging to the Pu Kong community.

Due to the costly and complex bureaucratic hurdles and the government’s unwillingness to cede land to Indigenous communities, only 40 communal land titles have ever been awarded out of Cambodia’s more than 450 Indigenous communities.

Though Pu Kong initiated its communal land title application in 2008, vast amounts of the village’s territory were later subsumed by state-granted economic land concessions for industrial agriculture. In 2018, a provincial government survey identified 804 hectares (1,987 acres) for Pu Kong village’s communal land title, though this was but a fraction of the village’s customary lands. By 2020, the provincial government had reduced this amount further when it requested that the Ministry of Environment, which has jurisdiction over protected areas like Keo Seima, approve the registration of 462 hectares (1,142 acres) for Pu Kong’s communal land title.

But the Ministry of Environment only agreed to let Pu Kong proceed with registering communal ownership over 262 hectares (647 acres), triggering a dispute that has contributed to the village still not receiving its communal land title several years on.

At the heart of the dispute is a conflicting REDD+ initiative.

In 2019, the Ministry of Environment and WCS established the 3,348-hectare (8,273-acre) Sre Preah Community Protected Area (CPA), overlapping with 128 hectares (316 acres) of land recognized by the provincial government as part of an area intended for inclusion in Pu Kong’s communal land title.

A CPA is a renewable 15-year contract for Indigenous or local communities to use, but not own, land under the Ministry of Environment’s jurisdiction. Under this classification, farming is prohibited without special approval, and the government retains the ability to redistribute CPA land to others, such as private companies or well-connected individuals.

WCS country director Alistair Mould told Mongabay that community protected areas like Sre Preah are intended to “enable communities to maintain customary land use tenure” as they wait to receive a communal land title. In project documents submitted to Verra and used by Verra to certify the project, the creation of the Sre Preah CPA is listed by WCS as evidence of meeting Verra’s standards around Indigenous land rights.

However, the Ministry of Environment cited the creation of the Sre Preah CPA to deny Pu Kong from receiving communal land ownership over the disputed stretch of land in 2020, government records obtained by Mongabay reveal.

Keo Seima REDD+ project reports prepared by WCS and submitted to Verra, along with Verra-approved audits, did not disclose the issue of the overlap between the Sre Preah CPA and Pu Kong village’s communal land title application.

Verra standards require the Keo Seima REDD+ project to “demonstrate that no activity is undertaken by the project that could prejudice the outcome of an unresolved dispute relevant to the project over lands, territories and resources in the project zone.”

WCS acknowledged that “some disputes may have been missed” in its project reports to Verra, but denies having “knowingly misled” Verra and its auditors.

As a result of the ongoing delay in receiving communal land ownership and insufficient land made available to the village, Pu Kong’s leaders say their community has been impeded from making decisions over how to use and allocate their land, and have been prevented from expanding their farmland – a common practice as families grow and financial needs increase amid the region’s transition from subsistence to a market-based economy.

In theory, carbon credit sales and alternative livelihood programs supported by the REDD+ project are supposed to reduce these needs, but initiatives promoted by WCS have struggled to gain traction in Pu Kong and are operating at a small scale across most partner communities in the project. Carbon credit revenue goes mostly toward building infrastructure like roads or water wells. A sustainable bamboo-harvesting initiative in the Sre Preah CPA has generated just $520 in income for Pu Kong and its neighboring villages between 2022 and 2023, while an organic rice program sold less than 10 tons last year across the entire project.

A few years ago, Bpel and more than 40 of her neighbors requested to farm in the “reserve forest” area, intended for the community’s future use or for families in need, within their village’s pending communal land title area. The reserve area largely overlapped with the Community Protected Area and the villagers’ request to use the land was not accepted by provincial authorities, said Poeub Pe, the commune chief overseeing Pu Kong and several other primarily Indigenous villages.

“People are hopeless because they made one request but there has been no results as always,” said Pe, who is also Bunong. “The higher authorities encourage us to make requests if needed but whenever people do so, they are not granted. Khmer people from outside the community have since taken all the land where the community requested.”

“REDD+ is aimed at conserving protected areas but it has undermined the rights of the community,” Pe added. “The indigenous people are warned of using the land within this area whereas the outsiders who have power can do it and expand the land. People in the community cannot do it unlike the outsiders.”

Community leaders also submitted an unsuccessful written appeal in 2022 to then-minister of land management, Chea Sophara, explaining that the Ministry of Environment had not granted their community enough land to use.

“I have five children who do not have land for themselves,” Bpel said. “They rely on one hectare of our land together. We support REDD+ and the communal land title, but we are not allowed to expand our farm.”

As authorities stonewalled her village’s land requests and the forest disappeared, Bpel went ahead and tried to illegally clear a farm plot in the dwindling reserve area for her family, leading to the destruction of her crops.

Pu Kong village chief Buj Mal that at least one-quarter of his village’s roughly 160 Bunong families face serious land insecurity and lack sufficient land to earn a living or subsist.

“New descendants do not have land. They rely on their parents,” Mal said. “We cannot expand our farmlands. While villagers cannot expand their farms, outsiders cut in immense amounts of land, so what seems appropriate?”

Rampant deforestation in the Sre Preah CPA

Under the Ministry of Environment and WCS’s watch, the village’s land in the Sre Preah CPA has hardly been protected.

From her home on the edge of the forest, Bpel said she can hear the sound of chainsaws every night, and walking through what is left of the Sre Preah CPA forest she pointed out piles of planed logs awaiting transport and bundles of cassava stems left over from illicit harvests.

The project aims to support communities to gather forest products from the Sre Preah CPA – this was one of the reasons the Ministry of Environment gave for refusing Pu Kong’s land ownership request – but there is increasingly little forest left there.

Global Forest Watch shows that 70% of the forest cover in Sre Preah CPA has been lost, with the majority of the deforestation occurring since 2015. Much of this forest clearance has come from hundreds of often landless outsiders who have arrived in the past 10 years to illegally clear and claim plots of land in hopes of securing their families’ futures.

In 2023 alone, Global Forest Watch reported more than 350 hectares (865 acres) of forest were destroyed. Of 363 farm or residential plots inside the CPA identified by a recent government survey, 309 belonged to migrant settlers who had claimed land there, according to data from WCS.

Many of the incoming frontier settlers are now in the process of receiving legal land ownership from national authorities.

“The title [for communal land ownership] is supposed to be for our village but the farms [in the Sre Preah CPA] belong to outsiders,” said Ven Mul, a Bunong community patrol leader from Pu Kong village.

Like many of the modestly paid Indigenous community patrollers, Mul said he is motivated by dedication to protecting the forest. He said he has twice been attacked with machetes while trying to prevent outsiders from claiming this land, and added his team is unable to halt the widespread illegal clearance without more support.

The ravaging of the Sre Preah CPA on the southwestern edge of the Keo Seima REDD+ project directly affects the amount of REDD+ project funds going to Pu Kong and two neighboring Bunong villages, which have performance-based contracts to patrol and manage the forest with WCS and the Ministry of Environment.

When Mongabay visited the Sre Preah CPA in early February, the ground still smoldered from where around 10 hectares (25 acres) of forest had been cleared and burned to make way for farming in the last few days by outsiders, about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from a Ministry of Environment ranger station. The deforested swath was part of the reserve forest once mapped for the village’s communal land title, and included the area that Bpel and her neighbors had previously been blocked from using by provincial authorities.

“We called the Ministry of Environment for help but they never came,” Mul said. “We asked all the authorities, and they won’t help. The forest is all gone.”

However, WCS reported to Verra in its most recent monitoring report that “communities are able to directly protect their property rights through community patrols, which are supported by PDOE [provincial department of environment] rangers as needed.”

One of the first of the hundreds of farmers to illegally clear land inside the Sre Preah Community Protected Area was Um Thon, who arrived more than 10 years ago as a laborer for one of the nearby state-granted economic land concessions for industrial agriculture. He later carved out a frontier farm in the middle of the forest in what became known as “36 village,” after the 36 founding families. They managed to successfully petition a high-ranking official, then-deputy prime minister Yim Chhay Ly, to issue a letter around 2016 supporting their makeshift settlement.

“I begged him: ‘We are very poor. We do not have land to reside on. Please allow us to live without fear of repercussions,’” Thon said.

Bolstered by the protection of a powerful patron, Thon has since built a mansion and large rubber plantation inside the Sre Preah CPA. He drives an industrial-size truck for hauling cassava and timber from what is left of the forest.

Down the road from Thon’s home, a REDD+ project sign warns people against clearing forest to farm. Behind the sign, rows of cassava extend far into the distance.

Imprisoning the most vulnerable

Rather than well-connected farmers like Thon, it is instead the long-standing residents of Pu Kong who experience the brunt of law enforcement under the REDD+ project.

After Pu Kong community patrollers returned from showing Mongabay the large recent clearing in the area intended for their communal land title, a crackle came on their radio: A Ministry of Environment ranger declared triumphantly that an arrest had been made.

The ranger and a military police officer emerged from a patch of forest holding an old man in dusty fatigues named Bun Hean, the husband of a Bunong resident of Pu Kong village.

Hean had been helping his neighbors clear land to farm about 40 meters (130 feet) inside the Sre Preah CPA, far from where the mass clearance had occurred. He had arthritis in his leg so he could not run away like his neighbors.

“You will face an interrogative session by my boss,” the ranger, Chheng Sothean, told Hean. “He will just want to see you and give an advisory warning of not going to clear in the [Sre Peah] Community Protected Area, so just speak the truth.”

But instead of a warning, Hean was sent straight to prison, where he would remain for the next five months. As rangers loaded Hean into a white SUV, his wife sat silently in the corner of the ranger station, trying not to cry.

After Mongabay informed a conservation researcher about the arrest, WCS told Mongabay it would provide Hean with legal support, via a Bunong law firm kept on retainer with REDD+ funds, and said the community had filed a verbal grievance with the REDD+ project, alleging unfair treatment.

WCS acknowledged there were “dozens of instances” of arrests involving Indigenous or local community members in the REDD+ project, which it said were “nearly all related to illegal land clearance.” Funds from the REDD+ project carbon credit sales also support law enforcement activities, and project documents cite arrests as a metric for meeting Verra standards.

WCS said it did not intervene in the majority of the 44 land tenure cases where communities filed grievances to the REDD+ project since 2017, though Mongabay found numerous additional unrecorded cases of land tenure disputes across the project that were not formally lodged as grievances. In 17 instances, WCS said it “actively” helped mediate these disputes, “leading to resolutions, releases from jail, or escalations to national authorities.”

In a very similar case to Hean’s, WCS chose not to intervene, even when the legal punishment pushed a poor community member deeper into poverty. Pyuum Dtoeun, a young Bunong farmer from neighboring Ou Chra village, said he lacked his own land to farm on and attempted to clear and cultivate about a half hectare (1-acre) plot of land in 2022 inside the Sre Preah CPA, alongside dozens of plots already carved out by others.

Dtoeun was caught by authorities and served more than four months in jail, requiring more than $3,500 in loans to pay authorities to secure his release. Dtoeun’s younger sibling, Nak, was also arrested and fined $1,000 last year after trying to establish a small farm on the edge of the CPA, though the commune chief said he managed to prevent Nak’s imprisonment. In both cases, the siblings lost their motorbikes and now earn around $5 a day harvesting cassava for outsiders who have illegally cleared farms in the Sre Preah CPA.

“It was tough to find money,” said Dtoeun, whose mother was forced to sell some of the little farmland the family had. “I took out loans from microfinance and I always get behind [on repayments]. I barely have enough money to keep my body and soul together.”

WCS representative Chea Phalla, who oversees Indigenous communities in Keo Seima, told Mongabay that these cases had not been recorded as grievances but that he was aware of them when they occurred. He said WCS had declined to provide any support because the two were engaged in illegal forest clearance and Ou Chra village already had its communal land title, implying legal land use and the community’s farming needs were settled.

“So our team does not so much take care of that case,” Phalla said. “And I think he [Dtoeun] is very suffering from this kind of thing.”

Pressured to give up their land

In January, the government launched a working group connected to the REDD+ project to attempt to speed up the communal land titling process for its partner communities in Keo Seima. But since then, officials have further undermined Pu Kong’s battle for land ownership, community leaders say.

On May 16, the provincial government’s land department summoned two Pu Kong representatives to meet and sign a document in which the representatives agreed to withdraw their village’s request for ownership of land inside the Sre Preah CPA, as well as for additional surveyed communal land previously denied to them by the Ministry of Environment.

“It was more like a threat to me to make the decision to accept,” said Drep Dtem, the Pu Kong representative leading the village’s Indigenous communal land titling application, who was one of the two villagers who signed the letter. “I and even the commune chief argued with them but we could not change their decision.”

The letter the two representatives signed states that the village will only apply for approximately 262 hectares of land for its communal land title, the amount the Ministry of Environment had approved in 2020. This is less than a third of the area originally surveyed by the provincial government, and far short of the more than 14,000 hectares claimed as customary lands by the community two decades ago.

Pe, the Sre Preah commune chief who was also present at the meeting, said the officials had violated the rights of the community by pressuring the representatives to sign in a closed door meeting, indicating the procedure did not follow the free, prior and informed consent process.

“The community representatives were not even allowed some time to review the letter, simply urged to follow their order,” Pe said. “The Land Department guys said if you refuse this offer, next time upon requesting for more land, you will get nothing.”

Mondulkiri provincial land department and environment officials declined to answer Mongabay’s questions about this meeting and other issues with communal land titling. A provincial administration spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. WCS did not provide comment on the May 16 meeting.

When asked about the allegations surrounding the meeting, Land Management Minister Say Samal, who also served as environment minister between 2013 and 2023, wrote in a Whatsapp text message that Mongabay had “just cooked it up to have a story.”

Regarding land rights in Pu Kong and other Bunong villages in Keo Seima, which collectively have had thousands of hectares of land denied approval for inclusion in communal land titles under his leadership at the Ministry of Environment, Say Samal wrote: “Everything is done in accordance to our laws.”

“All of our indigenous khmers [sic] are recognize under our laws and ancestral lands have also been registered,” he added, noting land is still being registered in some communities.

Dtem said he is not optimistic about Pu Kong’s future. One of his relatives recently received a summons to appear in court to face charges for illegal forest clearance for farming a plot in the Sre Preah CPA, which he had been using for around five years, while Dtem’s 18-year-old nephew was imprisoned in April for clearing farmland in a prohibited area. Dtem said it was unfair to punish his nephew, who he said lacked his own land, while others coming from outside took the community’s lands. Dtem said the tiny amount of land being allocated for the community’s communal land title – and the decades-long delay to receive it – was at the root of the village’s problems.

“We will lose the benefits of our land security,” Dtem said. “People want to have rights to access land they have used as their tradition. We always face arrests and persecution, even doing cultivation on our community land.”

New report details rights abuses in Cambodia’s Southern Cardamom REDD+ project

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