Mohammed Venot remembers when Suwanna Gauntlett of Wildlife Alliance came to his home in the middle of the Southern Cardamom Mountains in 2003. The chief executive of the international conservation non-profit had wanted to personally invite Mohammed to join a new community agriculture development project that the group was launching in Cambodia.
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It was an enticing offer, and Mohammed recalled it did not take much convincing for him to agree to it. A plot of land of 1.5 hectares (ha) was promised, a proper irrigation system would be installed and Mohammed and his family would get training from professional agronomists to grow their own crops on the new site, in exchange for conservation of the forest land he was then farming on.
Gauntlett also pledged that Wildlife Alliance would work with a mine removal agent to clear landmines in the area, which still posed a risk to locals, including farmers like Mohammed who might lose their limbs to these leftover explosives. “I decided to join immediately,” said the 66-year-old.
The Southern Cardamom rainforest, with its protected areas spanning about 4,100 square kilometres in Southwest Cambodia, is one of Southeast Asia’s largest surviving tropical rainforest habitats. The mountain ranges, once an impenetrable fortress for the Khmer Rouge guerillas when they were locked in a bitter battle with the Cambodian government forces and where they had hidden when the regime was toppled, was left mostly uninhabited and untouched for a long while in the past few decades. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, settlers like Mohammed – who came across these isolated forest plots – started making a living on the site from slash-and-burn farming, illegal logging and wildlife poaching.
