Chinese gold miners ‘illegally’ tearing up Cambodian wildlife sanctuary

*Name changed for the security of sources who feared retributions from authorities

KAMPONG THOM, Cambodia — “The company operates as they please. We’ve asked the authorities for help, but they won’t do anything for us,” said Bunnarith*, a lifelong resident of Snang An village in the densely forested province of Kampong Thom. “The people living in Snang An live here in misery.”

Nestled inside Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) inside the boundaries of the protected area, is a Chinese-owned gold mine to which Bunnarith can trace his misery.

On March 23, 2020, Late Cheng Mining Development was awarded an exploratory license spanning 15,100 hectares (37,300 acres) across Kampong Thom’s Sandan district, engulfing Snang An village.

Since then, the gold mining operation has only grown after being granted a license to extract gold in September 2022, clearing more forest within Prey Lang, which is home to 55 threatened species of wildlife and estimated to house 80% of Cambodia’s most endangered indigenous tree species.

Spanning nearly 490,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) and rich in a diverse range of fauna and flora, Prey Lang has long been targeted for its bountiful natural resources, to the point that the ecological integrity of the supposedly protected area is now threatened by illegal logging that continues to ravage the forest.

Authorities have struggled to rein in the often politically connected networks behind the destruction, which have exploited Prey Lang’s supply of timber, limestone, marble, gold and precious gems through extractive operations that often overlap as mines give cover to loggers.

Late Cheng is just one of the many stress factors pushing Prey Lang to the brink, but residents of Snang An alleged that the Chinese-run gold mine is encroaching on traditional farmlands and contaminating waterways.

These allegations were revived in a report published in October by Bruno Manser Fonds, a Swiss nonprofit focused on tropical rainforest conservation, which alleged that Late Cheng’s mine violates numerous laws and accused the Cambodian government of ignoring destructive gold mining operations inside Prey Lang.

“From an ecological perspective, open-pit mining is one of the most destructive extraction industries that exists,” said Ida Theilade, an ecologist at the University of Copenhagen and one of the report’s authors. “The environmental threats of open-pit mining are well known. Environmental destruction is not limited to the mining area itself — it includes roads fragmenting a fragile rainforest ecosystem.”

Cyanide usage in a ‘fragile rainforest ecosystem’

Speaking to Mongabay, Theilade detailed the report’s findings: that poisonous soil heaps and cyanide leaching ponds run the risk of contaminating the Porong River, posing a threat to the health of humans and wildlife alike.

“In case leaching ponds are breached, for example during heavy rains, this could have detrimental effect to aquatic life in freshwater streams and rivers downstream,” Theilade said. “It would cause serious health issues for villagers depending on downstream river water for irrigation, livestock or households. The diversion of streams through the mine exacerbates this threat.”

Besides serving at least five nearby villages with water for drinking, bathing and cooking, the Porong River also flows into the Chinnit River, a tributary of Tonle Sap Lake, one of Cambodia’s most important freshwater ecosystems.

When Mongabay visited Snang An in October, huge mounds of dirt were visible where the streams had been redirected. Residents said they were now wary of using water from either the streams or the river that they flow into.

“They have changed the flow of the water in canals to use it for chemical processing in the mining sites,” Bunnarith said. “The chemical substance flows to the Tracht and the Da [streams]. Both of these streams flow into the Porong River.”

The gold miners have achieved this, Bunnarith said, by diverting streams such as the Tracht and Da to flow through the mining site, where the water is mixed with cyanide as part of the gold leaching process.

This has prompted major concerns among residents of Snang An and the neighboring village of Srae Pring, where residents blamed a mass die-off of fish in the Porong River last year on Late Cheng’s mining activities; Mongabay was unable to verify these claims.

In October, reporters acquired water samples taken from both the Tracht and Da streams, which were then taken to a laboratory in Phnom Penh to be tested for cyanide and arsenic — another chemical often used by artisanal gold miners. Neither samples tested positive for arsenic, but while the sample from the Tracht stream came back negative for cyanide, the sample from the Da stream was found to contain 0.01 milligrams per liter, well below the 0.2mg/l set as an allowable limit by both Cambodia and the  Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.

A technician from the lab where the samples were analyzed noted that heavy rainfall around the time the samples were taken could have diluted the streams, but cautioned that there were many factors at work and that the sample results from October did not indicate the water was dangerously contaminated.

Commercial quarry in legal quandary

While the contamination risk remains difficult to quantify, the Bruno Manser Fonds report consistently calls into question the legality of Late Cheng’s mining operations inside Prey Lang.

The 2008 Protected Area Law outlines that mining is permissible in demarcated sustainable-use zones within protected areas. However, there’s no such zoning inside Prey Lang.

The law also stipulates that, if Late Cheng were operating within a sustainable-use zone, their mine would need to help contribute to conservation of the protected area as well as promote the standards of living of local communities.

Few in Snang An say the mine has contributed to improving the communities’ standards of living.

Residents say that access to the village has been limited since it was engulfed by Late Cheng’s mining operations. Initially, they say, roads built by the company were off-limits to villagers.  Now, they’re able to use them, but there are two checkpoints — one manned by Ministry of Environment rangers, another operated by a mix of rangers and local police — to tightly control access to both the mine and the village.

The restrictive environment endured by Snang An residents since Late Cheng began operations in the village has left many on edge. Few hold land titles recognized by the national government, and residents who did speak to Mongabay said they fear their homes and farms could be destroyed if gold is discovered on their property.

Meanwhile, the search for gold has seen more forest churned up each year.

“While a logged forest can regenerate, post-mining landscapes are most often left apocalyptic, devoid of vegetation,” Theilade said. “This is in sharp dissonance to the intentions of protected area law.”

The rerouting of streams and use of natural water resources for mining purposes may also be in breach of Article 41 of the Protected Area Law, which forbids “[d]estroying water quality in all forms, poisoning, using chemical substances, disposing of solid and liquid wastes into water or on land.”

If Late Cheng had conducted an environmental impact assessment that showed minimal damage to Prey Lang’s ecosystems or highlighted ways in which the company would mitigate environmental problems linked to their mine, this would likely fit with Cambodia’s legal framework. However, as the Bruno Manser Fonds report notes, no such study has ever been made public.

“And the EIA, if one was produced at all, is clearly inadequate given the environmentally-destructive activities that have already taken place within the concession area,” the report reads. “Thus, the legality of Late Cheng’s mining concession is open to challenge.”

Late Cheng Mining Development did not respond to detailed questions submitted by Mongabay in a letter to staff in the company’s Phnom Penh office. Phone calls to numbers listed on the government’s business registration site went unanswered, although one woman who did answer claimed not to work for Late Cheng and insisted that she had never heard of the company.

Reporters visited the…