CHHONG KNEAS, Cambodia, Jan 31 (Asia Water Wire) - Life ebbs and flows with hardships and vulnerability for the residents of this floating village at the northern end of Cambodia’s great lake, the Tonle Sap.

   The more than 5,000 people here, living on wooden houses on stilts, depend on fishing for their livelihood.

   They are grappling not only with problems like pollution, but are seeing their livelihood come under increasing threat from the activity of commercial fishing operations that use electronic nets or smaller boats to chase fish from a one or two kilometre area toward their nets. These commercial fishers’ capacity to get bigger catches undercuts the economic lifeline that the Tonle Sap – the largest freshwater lake in South-east Asia – is to those living here.

   There are other woes as well, ranging from the lack of basic facilities to unwelcome tourist activity, since parts of the lake are but a few hours from Siem Reap, the north-western Cambodian town that is home to the famed Angkor temples.
 
   Living conditions here are far from hygienic, especially during the wet season when the water levels rise and the whole area becomes a floating village. There are no sewage facilities or pipe-borne water. The provincial government has offered residents land on the mountains overlooking the lake, but few are willing to move.

   “This is the place of my birth. We don’t know how to change,”  a community fisherman in his fifties, Poeu Sareon, explained. “We don’t want to move; we like to fish.”

   A decree issued by the governor provides that if residents have lived in their areas before 1979, they own the land underneath their houses. If the government wants to take it for development, they need to compensate the villagers.

   “We lobby fisheries department officials to catch these people (commercial fishers, but) we have no power to stop them giving money to officials,” said one fisherwoman.

   Some frustrated residents have gone to the extent of trying to sabotage these operations, by cutting through the nets used by their bigger vessels.

   Sighed Chim Tek, another senior member of the community: “(There is) not enough fish to make a living now. So people change to construction and go and work in construction (sites in Siem Reap city 12 kilometres away) or work in ships (transporting goods to Phnom Penh and back)”.

   The problems faced by the community remain such despite efforts over the years to ensure that small fishers who live on and around the lake do not lose access to the rich resources of the Tonle Sap, whose waters provide up to 70 percent of the protein Cambodians get and whose flows ensure that nutrients are spread across a wide swath of Cambodia and surrounding areas.

   Since 1999, the Cambodian government has set aside thousands of hectares in the lake for community fisheries, where community management units look after fishing activities in their areas. In 2003 too, the Asian Development Bank gave a grant of 997,000 U.S. dollars to support local fisheries and take care of the environment. Other non-government groups also support initiatives toward community fishing.

   But illegal fishing methods used by the commercial fishers, combined with corrupt fisheries and law enforcement officials undermine the benefits from these approaches, community leaders say.

   A 2006 study by researcher Bernadette Resurreccion of the Bangkok-based Asian Institute of Technology observes that there is a strong connection between livelihood and management of water resources in the community, and that local residents have been threatened or shot by guards or paramilitary personnel when they approach commercial fishing activity areas.

   “These guards (hired by the fishing companies) also threaten illegal poachers and guarded lots even when lot owners had illegally extended their boundaries,” she said in a report published in the ‘Water Resources Development’.

   To allow fishing stocks to regenerate, there is ban on any fishing in the lake from August to October. But commercial fishers ignore this and bribe officials to turn a blind eye to these transgressions, says Minh Bunly, field coordinator for the local NGO Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT).

   While most say they would not move from the water, some, like Mao Sophea, says it is time to try their luck elsewhere.

   “(Because of) increased population in the village, the fish have become less and this leads to illegal fishing. So people want to change jobs,” said Sophea, a young fisherwoman who is about to marry a man from the mountains and move over there.

   For those staying on in Chhong Kneas, being the closest Tonle Sap community to the tourism-dependent town of Siem Reap carries with it additional hazards.
   The Chhong Kneas water community surrounds the ferry terminal, which is the major landing point for cargo, passengers and fuel bound for Siem Reap from the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Due to easy access to Siem Reap from Chhong Kneas, many tour companies now operate boat cruises for tourists through the waters of the community.

   Locals complain that they have become subjects for photography for tourists but do not gain much from these tours, because they have no capacity to provide any services or goods to these visitors.

   “We sit and watch all these people with money going around,” lamented senior community member Sok Hour. “We can’t build big boats to take them, we have no money (for these), and we don’t make souvenirs.”

   “We would like to set up a small business (to cater to the tourists) but the banks will not give us money,” complained Doueng Tha, a young woman with an ambition to become a businesswoman. “They want to first come and see your job, and if you have a certificate for land (ownership). They want us to put that in the bank to get small credit.”

   Increasingly, however, some NGOs say there are boat tours that can be arranged with the floating communities, with proceeds going to them.

   Clearly however, the challenge remains of how to create awareness within the community when it comes to facing big business and external factors whose presence may bring in some income to others, but might also deprive locals of access to the resources they have had for generations.

   Bunly believes that NGOs should play a role in helping local communities be aware of and assert their rights. “While there is a local fisheries management committee, it is the fisheries department officials who have the power to make decisions, not the community,” he explained. “We see the answer to reducing poverty in giving more power to the local management committees, and equipping them with skills to better lobby the governor’s office and fisheries departments (on protecting their resources)”.  (END/IPSAP/AWW/KS/JS/310107)