This is the second 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. Read part one here. Greung Bpel hacked at a wall of grass alongside the dirt road leading away from her village, and pointed toward where she had once farmed. A member of an Indigenous ethnic Bunong community, the elderly Bpel lives in the village of Pu Kong deep inside the 292,690-hectare (723,250-acre) Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, much of it part of a leading carbon offset initiative, in northeastern Cambodia’s Mondulkiri province. Last year, Bpel said, after she went into debt and worked for months to prepare a plot for farming, rangers from Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment demanded around $60 in extortion because she was using land without permission inside a protected area. Bunong farmer Greung Bpel at the site where she attempted last year to grow a farm. The land is part of a protected area, but falls within a territory where her village, Pu Kong, has requested an Indigenous Communal Land Title. Image by Jack Brook. At the time, the plot Bpel had been blocked from using was intended for her village’s communal ownership, according to measures put in place by the Cambodian government with support from the Keo Seima REDD+ project. And yet contradictory directives from the government and the REDD+ project are to this day preventing Bpel and her community from…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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