When her two teenage daughters started going to high school three years ago, Thong Samai began selling traditional wine that she makes with herbs gathered from the forest to sell alongside soft drinks at the entrance of Yeak Laom, a sacred lake that has become a popular ecotourism destination in eastern Cambodia.
It is early March and the largest wave of COVID-19 to hit the country is just starting – although no one knows yet just how bad it will get – and Samai watches as a group of domestic tourists stream out of a bright white van, and walk past her stall on their way to the lake’s edge.
“They [tourists] are afraid to go near me, and I’m also afraid they could give me COVID, but I still take the risk to run the business,” she told Al Jazeera.
Making between 70,000 and 100,000 riels ($17.5 – $25) on a good day, 40-year-old Samai, part of the Indigenous Tompoun community that runs the lake, says the income from her stall helped ensure her daughters could continue going to school.
But earnings have dried up since the start of the pandemic and during this month’s Khmer New Year, Cambodia’s biggest holiday, the lake was closed completely.
The pandemic – escalating again in Cambodia and forcing lockdowns in Phnom Penh and other hotspots – has been a continuing strain for Indigenous communities in the country’s Ratanakiri province, for whom the additional income from their natural and spiritual landmarks is critical to their financial survival and the health of their forest home.
Cambodia’s Indigenous groups make up less than two percent of the population and mostly live in in the hilly and forested northeast provinces such as Ratanakiri.
Few visitors walked down the stairs to Yeak Laom lake in Ratanakiri province’s Banlung city on March 9, 2021. (Roun Ry/Al Jazeera)But they are frequently pitted against agroindustrial companies with long-term leases that want to clear forests and plant commodity crops like rubber, encroaching onto the land that Indigenous people have tended for generations.
In the past, Indigenous communities used rotational agriculture and lived isolated from “lowland” Cambodians. But when outsiders began moving to Ratanakiri more than 20 years ago for the open land and job opportunities, Indigenous communities also began plantation-style farming and trying to earn income in other ways.
Ratanakiri province has lost nearly 30 percent of its tree cover – approximately 240,000 hectares (593,000 acres) – since 2000, and 43 percent of the loss was from primary forest, according to Global Forest Watch.
Many communities have come to regret the loss of the forests that mark their land.
They hoped ecotourism would provide them with a way not only to generate a little money but also to protect some of their remaining forest.
Community fishing leader Eang Vuth, 49, watches the flow of the Sesan River in Ratanakiri province’s Ou Ya Dao district last month [Roun Ry/Al Jazeera]
Close to Cambodia’s border with Vietnam, three villages from the Jarai Indigenous community have been stirred by hydropower dams along the Sesan River for more than 10 years but their bigger fear now is deforestation, which they hope tourism can stop.
Eang Vuth, 49, is not Jarai, but has become a part of the Indigenous Pa Dal village after arriving in 2009 to study and protest the effect of hydropower dams on the Sesan. In the last two years, he has noticed a company clearing some of the remaining thick forest in between Pa Dal and neighbouring Pa Tang village.
‘Bad people’
Vuth is now working with volunteers from the villages to transform two forested islands in the Sesan River into ecotourism sites where visitors can relax, swim and fish, hoping the project will stop companies from felling the trees for timber.
“We can make some profit from these places … We can use that as a result to show the government that the community here can make some income from the place, so if there is any company wanting to come here and do something, we will report that,” he said, although he worried in March whether the pandemic would curb its potential to attract tourists.
A fisher in Pa Dal village and a friend of Vuth, Galan Lveng, 55, sees ecotourism as one of the few ways to stop clearcutting in their village, and save some of the forest for the village’s young people.
“I’m afraid of losing the forest because bad people are always around, keeping an eye on it,” he said. “If these [ecotourism] plans happen, I’m sure we in the community will get involved. If we can save the trees, I will be so relieved.”
A boy washes his hands at a hand-washing station donated by Plan International Organization at Ratanakiri province’s Yeak Loam lake on March 10, 2021. (Roun Ry/Al Jazeera)Ecotourism has already made a difference in protecting the forest surrounding Yeak Laom lake where Samai has her stall.
Community ecotourism leader Nham Nea says his Tompoun Indigenous community began welcoming tourists and running businesses around the lake in 2000.
At the same time, Cambodians from other provinces began to take an interest in the villages’ land, buying it or compelling Indigenous families to get “soft titles” – unofficial deeds given out by local authorities – and sell the community land.
Because pieces of the villages were privately sold, the Tompoun residents of Yeak Laom could never get a communal land title but after years of asking, 225 hectares (556 acres) of forest and lake were granted protected area status in 2018, and Nea says the community has seen very few stumps – or loggers – on their patrols since then.
A few times a month, members of the Yeak Laom ecotourism committee trek a circular path through the area’s protected forest, looking for signs of logging. On one of the patrols in February, the Tompoun patrollers pointed out a rat trap worked into a small fence and confiscated a tangle of rattan wires used to catch wild chickens but found no new stumps or clearings.
