This is the first article in our two-part series on Indigenous land rights and the Keo Seima REDD+ project. This series was co-written by a Cambodian journalist whose name is being withheld due to security concerns. Lan and her elderly husband, Peam, were arrested in 2020 for farming rice in a restricted conservation area. The small plot of land they relied on to feed their family lay in the middle of the 292,690-hectare (723,250-acre) Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary in northeast Cambodia, a forest rich in biodiversity and intermixed with local and migrant farming communities. Much of the forest is now part of one of Southeast Asia’s most prominent carbon offset projects. Like many of their neighbors in remote Kmoum village, Lan and her husband identify as Bunong, an Indigenous ethnic minority group which has traditionally engaged in swidden agriculture and lacked records of official land ownership. Peam was imprisoned on the charge of illegally clearing state land, his wife recalls. Government rangers also confiscated the couple’s motorbike, which their children relied on to attend school, and authorities ignored a petition by more than 100 of Lan’s neighbors requesting her husband’s release due to the family’s “extreme poverty.” Lan eventually managed to gather the several thousand dollars in fees necessary to free her husband after he spent nine months in prison. Years later, the family remains in debt from the expense. Lan and her husband, whose names have been changed, still cultivate rice in the same place and say they run…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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