Cambodia is devastating its coast by dredging vast quantities of sand to sell to Singapore for expansion projects, with multimillion-dollar profits going to tycoons close to the Cambodian prime minister, a watchdog group said yesterday.
Cambodia has become the new prime source of the masses of sand used for projects to artificially enlarge Singapore’s territory now that several other Southeast Asian nations — including Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam — have banned sand exports because of environmental concerns.
Singapore has increased its surface area by 20 percent in recent decades by filling in coastal seabeds to create new, valuable waterfront ground, by “land reclamation.”
London-based environmental watchdog Global Witness criticized Singapore for the practice, pointing out that it “presents itself as a regional leader on environmental issues.”
“The country’s failure to mitigate the social and ecological cost of sand dredging represents hypocrisy on a grand scale,” Global Witness said in a report released yesterday.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen last year announced a blanket ban on sand exports following local protests, but the Global Witness investigation said the country continues to supply Singapore with tens of thousands of tonnes of sand dredged up from rivers and estuaries along the fragile coastline.
Operations from just one Cambodian province were estimated to be worth US$248 million annually in retail value in Singapore, the group said.
Cambodia’s law on sand actually banned only river sand from export, but Global Witness said its investigators found that both river and sea sand have been exported since the law was passed.
Global Witness said the government has been “failing to ensure compliance with Cambodia’s other environmental and socio-economic legal framework,” though a Cambodian government spokesman said that dredging is confined to areas where the environment would not be degraded.
Singapore’s Ministry of National Development said sand import is carried out by private enterprises, which must by law “not breach any of the source countries’ environment rules and other relevant laws.”
The Cambodian sand trade, Global Witness said, is monopolized by two senators with close ties to Hun Sen “with no evidence of any revenues [from the exports] reaching Cambodia’s state coffers.”
Senator Mong Rethy refused to comment when reached by telephone, while the other, Senator Ly Yong Phat, could not be reached despite several attempts.
Global Witness’ latest report said Cambodia’s sand-dredging industry “poses a huge risk to its coast, threatening endangered species, fish stocks and local livelihoods. There is no evidence that basic environmental safeguards have been applied.”
It said that concessions had been allocated inside protected areas and that on one day alone, nine dredging vessels were spotted inside such a zone. Extraction has actually increased since last year, it said.
The report quotes a government Web site as estimating that up to 54,430 tonnes of sand are mined each month from Koh Kong Province.
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