Last Updated on 08 February 2013 By May Titthara, David Boyle and Danson Cheong From The Phnom Penh Post
Prom Rin smokes in
the jungle on land a Chinese firm has been surveying for a proposed dam
in the Areng Valley. Photograph: Will Baxter/Phnom Penh Post
Yong Yim’s voice rises to a high-pitched quiver when she talks about a
planned dam in the Areng Valley that would inundate land her family has
inhabited for hundreds of years to form what amounts to a giant battery.
“Sometimes I am crying, because I will miss my homeland and my
ancestors’ farmland,” she says, spitting out chunks of betel nut.
The
trees and shrubs that flourish in this haven between peaks of the
Cardamom Mountains now bear an ominous token: red demarcation ribbons
posted by Chinese engineers a few weeks ago.
Yim, 65, was born
here among a cluster of villages populated by 380 families. Most say
they are Chong and Phor ethnic minorities, who fall under the umbrella
identity of the Khmer Daeum — literally “original Khmers”.
The
Khmer Daeum are so isolated they still speak a dialect believed to have
derived from ancient Khmer that has been preserved since their ancestors
fled from Thai invaders to the isolated Cardamoms hundreds of years
ago.
Now they are staring at forced relocation again, their
ancestral homelands all but doomed to become yet another area on the
fringes of the Central Cardamom Protected Forest (CCPF) to be devastated
by the effects of hydropower dams. To date, there are three dam
projects, some with multiple stations, under way on the boundaries of
the CCPF.
Lee, an engineer working on one of those projects, the
Stung Tatai, told the Post late last month plans to begin construction
of the bitterly opposed Cheay Areng dam were moving ahead rapidly.
“I
spoke with the project leader of the Cheay Areng dam recently, and he
said that next month [February] representatives from the company will
meet with the Cambodian government to discuss the project,” Lee, who
spoke on the condition his full name would not be printed, said.
“If all goes well, construction could start as soon as July.”
Lee
said a feasibility study for the once-abandoned Cheay Areng dam had
recently been completed by China Guodian Corporation, the huge,
state-owned firm that took over the project after China Southern Power
Grid pulled out of the project in 2010.
The details of that
study, Lee said, were scarce, and he had not investigated too much
because matters here with the government could be “complicated”.
Repeated
requests for comment from China Guodian Corporation went unanswered and
the company hung up on reporters when reached by phone.
Previous
studies conducted for the firm China Southern Power Grid, which dumped
the project because they deemed it unfeasible, suggest that a
109-megawatt dam would be fed by a 20,000-hectare reservoir.
Roughly
10,000 hectares of this reservoir would cover forest directly within
the CCPF, the largest single encroachment to date on what is one of
Cambodia’s last remaining well-protected conservation zones. The
remaining 10,000 hectares of the reservoir would inundate the forest
homelands of the Khmer Daeum.
But despite the massive impact, the energy output would be strikingly small.
Tracey Farrell, senior technical director for Conservation
International-Cambodia, which supports conservation programs in the
CCPF, said in an email that a previous environmental impact assessment
had found that the dam “failed to meet the minimum power density ratio
of more than 100 watts/m2 of surface area of the reservoir”.
