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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS