Imagine you've invested in an eco-resort. You walk from your villa down to the river and are shocked to find a noisy barge dredging sand from the riverbed. As horrifying as it sounds, it was a reality for Janet Newman, a former criminal barrister from England, who, in 2008, created an eco-resort replete with solar panels on the Tatai River in Cambodia's Cardamom mountains.
'We were 'visited' one day by some large boats after a smaller boat had come and drilled right outside Rainbow Lodge,' she says, referring to her resort. 'Two came for one day and I went to speak to them ... They pumped for one day, were quite polite, but I could tell they did not like my questions and, thankfully, they left.'
Environmentalists fear the dredging of sand from Cambodia's rivers and beaches will hurt the country's tourist industry in the long term. Visitor numbers have been growing and now account for about 5 per cent of gross domestic product. Anything that detracts from that is of concern to the companies that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into offering its unspoiled seclusion to homebuyers and holidaymakers.
One of the beneficiaries, however, has been Singapore. It is estimated that, in 2008, about 14.2 million tonnes of sand from Cambodia went into building Singapore's two mega casinos, and a further unknown amount was used to help feed its ambition to increase its surface area by about 520 square kilometres by 2030.
NGO Global Witness estimates that 796,000 tonnes of sand, with a market value of US$248 million, is exported to Singapore every month from Cambodia's southwestern Koh Kong province alone.
'The damage to the environment is irreversible,' says a Global Witness spokesman, who insists on anonymity. 'Unless somebody calls a halt to this rape of its estuaries, rivers and seashore, Cambodia's ambition to be regarded as the region's last bastion of eco-protection will, like its beaches, be gone forever.