Marine sand dredging kicked off along Cambodia’s coastline, with dredging machines popping up in Sihanoukville, Kampot and Koh Kong.Īccording to UN records, Cambodia reported exporting 5.9 million tonnes of sand in 2008, compared to less than 20,000 tonnes three years prior. In the late 90s, after a flood of people had resettled in Koh Sralao, the village was part of a collective of islets in Koh Kong province to be dubbed a Ramsar Site, wetlands designated by Unesco to have international importance for their rich ecosystem.Ībout a decade later, the ecosystem took a dramatic turn. The change, he says, came after the machines began blaring. Now, Saron often hunts snails in lieu of a catch. “Now, it takes hours just to get one kilogram,” he says.īundles of fish nets and stacks of crab cages decorate the decks of the village’s stilted homes, but are now rarely in commission. Less than a decade after Saron relinquished his leadership role in 2000, the village of over 300 families’ record of effortless and bountiful catches came to a halt. You could pull two nets from the water and have hundreds of kilograms of fish.” The water was waist high, so you would wade through the water and pick the fish up with nets. “I helped build the community from scratch,” he says – those were the community’s glory days, he explains fervently. He was among many to resettle in the quiet community as a fisherman during that time, aware that the island village thrived off of a seemingly endless supply of fish and crab. In 1985, he says, he became village chief under Cambodia’s Vietnamese-backed communist government, spending half of his days fishing and the others in meetings with higher-ranking officials. His body tells the tale of a man who has laboured tirelessly – his knuckles inflamed as if host to arthritis, his cheeks concave and one eye glazed over with cataracts from a life largely spent floating above the reflection of the sun.īut unlike now, when making ends meet is uncertain and requires great determination and countless snails, Saron once commanded both Koh Sralao and the surrounding waterways with ease. He has survived off of the generosity of the Koh Kong estuary and its mangroves since resettling in the island village of Koh Sralao from Kampot province in 1982, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Khieu Saron, 66, prepares his boat to collect shells from the mangrove forest that surrounds Koh Sralao village.
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