All over Cambodia’s northeast, in guesthouses and coffee shops across a provincial swath covering Preah Vihear, Ratanakiri and Kratie, you can see them – heavy chairs and tables polished to a high gleam, in colors ranging from honey to deep, brick red. Much has been made of a taste for Cambodia’s endangered luxury wood by in China and Vietnam, a taste that’s reached forests and ELCs nearly all the way to the Lao border. Less is said of Cambodia’s own consumption, or why, in a country where the harvest and selling of rare timber species is completely illegal, fine furniture is displayed and sold virtually everywhere from wealthy villas to roadside restaurants. In a coffee shop not far from the market in Stung Treng, red-brown wooden tabletops are stacked against the wall. A price sticker on one marks the cost, which the owner confirms: $1700. “I have about one customer a month,” says Mr. Z, who prefers his name not be used. “They come to my coffee shop and ask to buy the tables.
Many are from Vietnam – some, though, are from Cambodia.” The tables are made of Thnong wood, dark red, which he buys, he says, from a village in the north of Stung Treng province. “They are out of wood already up there,” he explains. He has just a few tables remaining – but, in the future, he plans to find another source. “I will continue my business,” he says, “as long as it sells.” Thnong, a kind of Paduak wood in the genus Pterocarpus, is popular with the Vietnamese, says Mr. Y, who shapes wooden beds and cabinets in the back of his small outlet near the town of Kratie. “Cambodian customers prefer Beng,” he explains, referring to a red, hard wood in the genus Afzelia. “It has a lighter, nicer color. It looks good in a house.” Mr. P., who works with Mr. Y, describes their main customers as wealthy Cambodians from Phnom Penh. “They’re Khmer,” he says. “They think the wood is beautiful. Poor people can’t afford it, though.” Mr. Y estimates that he has two to three customers a month, and sells his beds and cabinets for anywhere from $600 to $800.
He has a Facebook page for his business, but says that he finds many of his customers when they catch sight of his beds as they’re driving through the province. “Average people will buy small things,” he says, “a statue, a cabinet. The wealthy will commission and buy more.” He uses mostly Beng, he says, and gets it from Ratanakiri. “There’s not much left, though,” he says. “There’s not much wood left in Cambodia at all.” Though both Mr. Y and Mr. Z sell their products openly, neither of them have had problems with the government’s Forestry Administration and hardly any law enforcement, they say. “I’m just a small business,” says Mr. Z. “They don’t want to give small businesses trouble.” He goes on to say that the people that have problems with the law are the people who cut down the trees, and he doesn’t ask them what they do about this. The Forestry Administration doesn’t really bother him, confirms Mr. Y. “If we have a big business – well, maybe we’ll be fined.
But if it’s just a small business? They understand that we’re Khmer, just the same.” The real problems, he laughs, come from journalists. “The journalists ask for the most money. Well, sometimes they might ask for a discount.” The Forestry Administration of Kratie confirms that they do not fine or attempt to stop those who sell illegal wood as a small-scale business in town. “What do we do?” says Try Sopheak, director of the Forestry Administration in Kratie. “If it’s a small business? If they’re just supporting their family? We don’t fine them, and we don’t catch them. They are very poor. If they don’t have this business, maybe they’ll die.” “There are a lot of them, though,” he continues. I’ve seen them, on the road to Kampi, all over.” Sopheak emphasizes that the Forestry Law has strict limits, as well. “We can’t prosecute people for selling finished wood. Unfinished wood is different – beds and furniture in the process of being made, we can catch and fine.
And finished wood being transported – we can stop the driver and ask for a receipt from where they bought it. If they have a receipt, though, we can’t do much.” The small-scale transport of illegal wood doesn’t stop at the Cambodian borders. Rather, a number of enterprising middlemen ply National Road 7, which runs between the Lao border and Snuol, at the border with Vietnam. “Maybe 30 people from Kratie drive motos to the Vietnam border every day with logs of Thnong,” says Mr. X, who says he spent six months in the business, taking logs from Siem Pang on a boat to Kratie, and then in a car to the border. Though small-scale businessmen aren’t the most significant source of illegal logs going to Vietnam, Mr. X maintains that they move a good amount of product, though obviously, there are no hard numbers on illegal enterprise. “Maybe 30 percent of the wood that goes across the border is from the local people,” he says, “as opposed to companies.” Law enforcement is not unaware of this, he says.
On the national road between Kratie and Snuol, there are seven or eight places, he says, where those carrying logs will be stopped. “You have to give to journalists, the ‘forest boss’ (a colloquialism for those who work in the forestry administration), soldiers and the police. If you give each person 4000-5000 riels, it means that you lose something like 20000 riels ($5) per stop.” The worst, he says, are the journalists, whom they pay to not take pictures of them. “Still,” he says, “you can make anywhere from $25 to $200 on a trip.” The economic police of Kratie, responsible for the road, state that they do not fine local people transporting wood on National Road 7, at least not those carrying small amounts. “They’re very poor,” says Keo Sokhien, chief of the economic police of Kratie. “We don’t have much to do with them.” Mr. Sopheak emphasizes that the job of the police, when they do catch those on the road transporting wood, is merely to hold them for the Forestry Administration.