KOH KONG, Cambodia — At around 10:45 p.m. on a Friday in March, the order came to turn out the lights about 3 kilometers, or a mile and a half, from shore. Chhuan, the speedboat’s driver, who gave only his first name, killed the engine, and in the pitch black, rolling on the waves, the fishing village of Chroy Svay was barely visible. The crew huddled around a digital map, checking that they wouldn’t run into fishing nets laid by their fellow fishers that morning. “What did you say? It’s a trawler, right?” Sedh Phoeun, another local fisher on board, was frantically asking his brother over the phone whether the steady hum of the trawlers’ engines was still audible back on shore. From the speedboat, Phoeun had temporarily lost both sight and sound of them. “I see,” Phoeun said into the phone before relaying directions to Chhuan: Two trawlers were heading west. Perhaps they’d heard the sound of the speedboat and were trying to flee these fishing grounds. Sedh Phoeun aboard the speedboat in pursuit of trawlers illegally fishing off the coast of Koh Kong. Screenshot from ‘Illegal fishing and land grabs push Cambodian coastal communities to the brink’ by Andy Ball / Mongabay. Phoeun, Chhuan and the other men on board the speedboat aren’t police or navy. They’re members of the Chroy Svay community fishery (CFi), a group of local small-scale fishers, and they’re responsible for patrolling the nearly 13,500-hectare (33,300-acre) body of water from which they pluck their…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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