Caught Up in the Middle

Sheltering under a blue tarpaulin amid dense woodland in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains, Nhean* sits and waits for night to fall after a long day scouring the protected forest for luxury timber.

He says he works for a broker who is a supplier to one of Cambodia’s most prolific logging tycoons, Try Pheap, and has journeyed across a vast area of southern Cambodia moving on to a new patch of forest when the sought-after hardwood is exhausted.

“I bring my little children and wife along with me, but I will go back to my hometown within the year,” he says. “My children do not go to school. But if I left them at home, no one would look after them.”

Nhean is one of hundreds of illegal loggers who live a mobile and impermanent existence following the logging brokers, armed with chainsaws and buffalo-drawn carts.

In what amounts to a kind of unofficial franchise arrangement, loggers such as Nhean take out loans to buy equipment and in turn supply sawn rosewood, beng, thnong and other luxury timber to middlemen who say they work for Pheap.

Pheap has, over the past decade, risen from relative obscurity to be one of the most prominent tycoons in Cambodia, with interests in casinos, plantations, logging, mining, hotels and real estate.

Since early 2013, his companies have been granted the rights to collect and buy timber from economic land concessions in 15 provinces, as well as all timber impounded by the Forestry Administration and Ministry of Environment.

Much of that wood has been classified as “waste wood” by the government in order to justify the sale, and Pheap is legally obliged to destroy most of it. Despite a prime ministerial order issued earlier this year banning the collection, transportation and ownership of rosewood, Conservation International has said that employees of Pheap’s companies took some of the protected wood held as evidence in illegal logging cases from their rangers just days after permission was given for him to collect the remaining timber.

A section of previously forested land lays bare in Pursat provice last month after loggers from the nearby camp felled the trees for lumber

A section of previously forested land lays bare in Pursat provice last month after loggers from the nearby camp felled the trees for lumber. Heng Chivoan

Pheap was also granted the right to process and buy yellow vine in the Atai hydropower reservoir - providing it did not affect the environment and he paid tax - despite Cambodia’s forestry laws explicitly prohibiting the...