[Back]

1.      Mean Rith Commune

 

2.1.   Introduction to Mean Rith Commune

The Sandan Assistant District Chief said that the commune was about 780 km², with 3600 people living in 7 official villages. Mean Rith in the past was the poorest commune in the District, because the Commune Chief said it was the furthest away, with high illiteracy and no schooling. This is an unwieldy commune stretching from the Sen river to near Phnom Gee (a gold mining area). The distance from one to another village is about 10 km. The furthest village from the Commune headquarters in 57 kms along difficult roads. Now new villages of 100 – 200+  families have sprung up covering nearly all the red soil areas. One Commune Councillor (Mr. Srey Siek) lives in this area, but the ‘Areas’ (villages) are not officially recognized and all Area Chiefs are unsalaried even though they have been appointed by Sandan District and Mean Rith Commune. 

Apart from anything else the distance and inaccessibility makes providing health care particularly difficult and the death of mothers and babies in childbirth was mentioned in O Pork as a serious problem. By far the majority of people interviewed said they either go to Sandan District hospital when they have an illness in the family, but some also said they go to Kampong Tmor hospital or Tum Ring clinic. 

Major development activities in the commune have included building a dam 3.50km long and repairing an irrigation system in Kanti and Tboung Toek villages, near the Sen River. More dams are planned. Another 5 villages, Choam Svay, Boeng, Som Aung, Rang Khnay and Trapeang Tralach, have rainfed rice systems (upland and lowland) and often face drought.

While Anlong Khting Area are halfway building a school all villages visited lack schools. Because of the unofficial status of these villages it is difficult to get teachers assigned to them. Out of 38 people who answered during interviews, 36% said their children didn’t go to school because there was no school, no teachers or they were needed for work in the chamka, 47% said their children were studying locally, with monks, in Sandan or Kampong Tmor. Iliteracy was found to be around 45% of the 40 people interviewed. People also said they spoke only Khmer language apart from 4 people who said they knew Kuy. There are 5 Kuy families living near Post 99 in O Pouk. They came from Kbet village, Ngon Commune, Sandan District, before Colexim came to the area with one family arriving a year ago (Puth Bon Kuing pers. comm.).

The Sandan Asst. District Chief informed that some people in the past did shifting agriculture but since the last 3 years this is not so common and people moved to the red soil areas to plant cash crops. The District authorities tried to stop people from going and clearing forest on the red soils but they have not been able to prevent this. People first moved from older nearby villages because they saw the fertile soil was good for growing soybeans. The Asst. District Chief said that one cassava plant can yield up to 20kg of tubers.

The Asst. District Chief also said that at the moment there is not so much cutting forest for farming because most of the red soil is occupied and authorities also take measures to stop this. Sketch mapping activities conducted in all the 4 ‘Areas’ discussed below showed that there are no significant forest areas on the cash cropping red soils. One small hill in O Laok has some forest because the soil is rocky. There are many remnant trees and forest clumps, including remnant resin trees.

The maps also showed that water sources are limited and lack of water is a serious problem in the dry season. Eleven families (28%) said their water source is a well or a stream 1km or more from their house. This causes considerable hardship towards the end of the dry season.

The Sandan Asst. District Chief was very interested in implementing community forestry (CF) activities as an option for forest management. He said that the Forest Administration (FA) can’t manage the concession companies and communities are more likely to look after the forests which they use. He said that he had seen a model of CF from Ratanakiri (Poey Commune), which he was interested to follow. He was interested to know how these kinds of activities are operating.

The Asst. District Chief also said that now there is a decrease in illegal poaching, since early 2004 because the FA came to confiscate wild animals in markets. Now serious hunting is happening in the Phnom Gee gold mining area, in So Chet Commune. Up to 10 samba and muntjac deer are being shot every night for sale. There are also reports of cows dying after drinking water from the gold mining operations at Phnom Gee.

2.2.   History of the occupation of the red soil areas

The Mean Rith Commune Chief (CC) said that people started arriving in the red soil area after 1983-84. Originally in the 1980s people Choam Svay and Sam-Aong villages and lowland rice farmers from along the Stung Sen, Sandan District) came to farm in the red soil area, but didn’t live there full time (see Trend Analysis of the Specific zones Tables 22-24).

An ITTO (International Timber Trades Organisation)/Department of Forestry and Wildlife study of Non-Timber Forest Products, that included three villages of Sandan District in Kampong Thom (Sam Ang and Choam Svay village in Mean Rith commune and Tum Aur village in Tum Ring commune), found that the people in Kampong Thom “mainly depend on forest resources” and that oleoresin was one of the principle products they collected for commercial purposes. (Ly Chou Beang et al., 2003, in Cock 2004). Other important subsistence activities for the original inhabitants in Sam-Aong and Chaom Svay villages were/are fishing, in the Porong River, and trapping of small forest animals.

The resin trees that these villages tapped on the red soils were cut down by the Colexim Company and by newer migrants (P. Swift pers. comm.). The majority of the red soil areas along the Colexim road have been cleared since late 2001. As mentioned land speculation that began with the arrival of the Chup company in next door Tum Ring Commune drove some of this large scale clearing. Rumors that all the red soils in Mean Rith would be taken for rubber development also forced people in Sam-Aong to clear all their swiddens, erect fences and get family members to physically occupy the land, so that it could not be grabbed from them (E. Galabru pers. comm.).

Much more recently people have been moving in from all over – Sandan District, Kampomg Thom Province, Kampong Cham, Kandal, Takeo Provinces, Phnom Penh, etc.  Now unofficial settlements such as O Pork have developed and include older occupants who have moved onto the land that they were farming before and newer in-migrants. 

Table 2 explains the length of occupation of the families interviewed and their village/communes they originally came from. All respondents said that before coming here they were lowland rice farmers. Table 3 explains their reasons for coming to this area. Table 4 shows that the predominant way that families have acquired their land has been through forest clearing.

Table 2: Origins of Mean Rith Inhabitants

Area name

No. of respon-dents

Average family size

Average number of years here

Range

(years)

No. of families less than 5 years

Families came from

(no. of respondents),

                               Commune/

Village                   District*

O Laok

8

4.9

13.1

2 – 30

3

 

 

 

Choam Svay (4),

Karong (1),

Tamkok (1),

 

Mean Rith, SD

Tuming, SD

 

Baray, SD (1).

O Pork

11

5.6

5.4

2mth – 16

8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peamkhlang (1), Klan (1),

 

Romphous (1),

Trokoun (1),

Prey (1),

Kampong Sdach

Klang 

 

Ngon C (1),

Tum Ring, SD

SD?

SD

Mean Chy, SD (1),

Baray, SD, (1),

Kratie Prov. (1)

Chom Phkar

10

4.5

11.9

3 – 25

2

 

Andoung Pring  (6) and Keo Rong (1)

Onlung Vang (3).

Chertiel, SD 

 

Sandan, SD

Anlong Khting

10

6.4

11.8

4mth – 28

2

Keo Rong (4), Samret (4),

Toul Svay (1)

Kobey Prey, (1)

Peamklang (1)

Chertiel, SD

 

 

Ngon

Klang

Total

40

5.35

10.3

 

15

 

* (SD) = Sandan District

 

Table 3: Reasons for coming to the Mean Rith area

Area name

No. of respondents

Good land/Do upland cash cropping

Family is poor

No work/Can get work/Change job

No Land/Difficult to make a living

O Laok

7

3

3

1

 

O Pork

12

3

3

3

2

Chom Phkar

10

 

 

 

10

Anlong Khting

10

 

8

 

2

Total

39

6

15

4

16

 

Table 4: How these families acquired their land.

Area name

Rent

Clear forest

Bought From family

Clear forest and buy

Ask people

No land

O Laok

 

5

2

1

 

 

 

O Pork

 

2

4

 

1

1

2

Chom Phkar

 

8

1 (from father)

1

 

 

 

Anlong Khting

1

9

 

 

 

 

 

Total

1

25

7

2

1

1

2

 

2.3.   Development plans in Mean Rith – Prospects of rubber development

The District FA staff told villagers that there was a request to begin a rubber development in Mean Rith (Puth Bon Kuing pers. comm.). The District FA staff were changed soon after that in order to prevent them from saying more. The Commune Chief was not aware of any plans for rubber development in Mean Rith. The Sandan District Asst. District Chief did however say that next year Chup rubber company was going to improve the road from Tum Ring to Sandan District centre a distance of 45kms. This improvement would connect up with the existing Mien Li Heng road.

The area of red soil in Mean Rith is larger than in Tum Ring, with villagers in O Pork saying that red soil in Mean Rith covers 6,000 ha. The Commune Chief said one of the things that is pushing land sales in this area is that buyers say the Government has already given the land for a concession so the people may as well sell it as they are going to loose it in the future anyway. Colexim Company also tells people that the Government has given them the forest and the land.

Reports indicate that land allocation/selling in the past in Mean Rith was organized by two Colexim managers based in Camp 99. These 2 sold land to people moving into O Pork on condition that they hand over the timber to them. These 2 Colexim managers are also the ones presently organizing timber transports concealed in banana trucks and they run a carpentry workshop in Sam-Aong village. Evidence also suggests they are operating as soy bean traders and villagers report that during the soy bean marketing season timber is concealed by soy bean sacks filled with rice husks. 

2.4.   Tenure status of the people of Mean Rith

Some people in O Pork reported that Forestry officials, came to the village and asked if it would be possible to find 500ha of land. Villagers replied that it might be possible to find 1 ha but not 500. In another case the FA representatives came and asked some people in O Pork to put their thumbprints on a document. The FA was asked to read the document which, said that the villagers are responsible for environmental destruction and forest clearing. After hearing this the villagers refused to sign the document. On 10/10/03 another attempt was made by Colexim, Forestry and Military personnel with guns to get people to thumbprint documents describing/recognizing the area of land they owned, under the guise of organizing Gatin celebrations at Klien village pagoda. People didn’t agree to this because the village and commune authorities were not present. The officials then asked the villagers to write the names (on one piece of white paper each) of people who didn’t agree.[1]  

The District authorities do not recognise the land tenure of villagers on the red soils because they say they moved there illegally and they are not yet recognized by the Ministry of Interior. For reasons of security, the District have set up a provisional status governance of the area and have arranged people into groups and villages. The District and Mean Rith Commune Council (with the support of CoDec) have begun to register the names of the residents on the red soils in Mean Rith. This will be sent with a request to the District to recognise these villages provisionally.

Villagers are keen to get official recognition for their village. Provisional village and krom chiefs have been appointed and these are working without salary. Once some kind of provisional village status is granted CoDec and the villages plan to apply for provisional land titles. The plan is to prepare a cadastral map of each village. At present the provisional Chiefs in these areas are measuring land holdings. Only 1 family interviewed said they had a land title. It is also not clear what will happen legally to families who have cleared forest after 2001, when the Land Law made clearing forest to claim possession illegal. 

2.5.   Organisations working in Mean Rith Commune 

2.5.1.      CoDec

CoDec is an amalgamation of KVOD and RFDA. In the past KVOD worked in the area of forestry advocacy. Overall CoDec is involved in decentralization, health/AIDS education, tree nurseries (producing timber and fruit trees), animal health, self help credit associations, rice banks; training in lowland rice, IPM, vegetable growing and compost making. The CoDec representative, Mr. Puth Bon Kuing, presently works 10 days per month in Mean Rith establishing and training management committees in villages to deal with decentralisation, community forestry and land management. CoDec is assisting the village committees to register all inhabitants, prepare records of land ownership, etc. The Commune Chief of Mean Rith commented that people don’t really understand about decentralisation.

CoDec had plans to do PLUP activities in O Pork/Mean Rith but they lack the technical expertise and are afraid they may misguide villagers if they try and do this. A trial PLUP activity in Kampong Thom Province is being carried out in Santook District this year. 

2.5.2.      RPFD – Rural Poor Families Development

RPFD are involved in community forestry (CF) work in the area. They organize management CF structures in all villages and villagers do the forest boundaries by themselves. This CF work has not yet received official recognition. When applications have been sent to the Provincial FA, they have said that everything would have to be done again because the FA did not participate in the process. Now RPFD are carrying out community forestry activities in Tum Ring, Sochet and Krayea Communes in cooperation with the Forest Administration.[2]

NGO Forum funded RPFD to coordinate a network of NGOs working in community forestry in Kampong Thom in 1997. There have been problems with the use of funds for the network, and the CF network has become inactive since 2000-2001. Mr. Thong Sophet, RPFD Director said that organizations involved in the network needed clear programmes and supporting funds.  There are plans to restart the network again. 

2.5.3.      Silaka

Are involved in conflict resolution training of District and Commune officials.

[Top]        [Back]


[1] Minutes of this meeting are available from CoDec.

[2] Community forestry is planned for 8 villages in Tum Ring Commune including: Tum Ar (2105ha), Khoas (1283ha), Leng (1903ha), Kbal Damrei (1435ha), Roneam (1326ha), Sror Lao Srong (1436ha) and other two villages are being discussed with Colexim company. (Thoang Sophet, RPFD Director)