Cambodian Mangroves

Beyond the bustling town of Koh Kong, off the coast of southern Cambodia, lie 45,000 hectares of mangrove forest – among the most pristine in Southeast Asia. Like others around the world, Cambodia’s mangroves are under threat.

Mangroves form a transition zone between land and sea. Like all transitional ecosystems, they are diverse. Mangrove foliage provides rich bird habitat. Fish, crabs and mollusks hide and breed in their dense, aerial root system, which is adapted to salty water.

As if these ecosystem services weren’t enough, mangroves stabilize soil, moderate the force of wind and waves, recycle nutrients and sequester carbon.

Ironically, Cambodian mangroves prospered under the Khmer Rouge, which preferred to herd its citizens into the middle of the country. With their downfall, and the emergence of a market economy in the 1990s, powerful entrepreneurs – with military or government links – began clearing the mangroves for shrimp farms and charcoal. Local middlemen joined in, along with inland Cambodians and foreign fishermen attracted to the region’s rich mangroves.

Alarmed by resource decline – and encouraged by international NGOs – the Cambodian government began cracking down. Conservation and poverty reduction could both be promoted, the government reasoned, by empowering local communities. Commune elections were held for the first time in 2002, followed by a community fisheries law. For the first time, mangrove communities began managing their own resources.

With help from the U.N. Development Program and Canada’s International Development Research Center, Cambodia’ Environment Ministry launched the Participatory Management of Coastal Resources Project in 1997. Community workshops were held on mangrove ecology and management. In 2001, the first village management committees were formed within the boundaries of Peam Krasaop Wildlife Sanctuary, deep in Koh Kong’s mangroves. Villages outside the sanctuary, around Chrouy Pros Bay, have been invited to participate, in order to reduce fishing conflicts.

Community management has been a success. Villagers have protected local sea grass beds, which are linked to the mangrove ecosystem and add fish spawning habitat. In the mangroves themselves, community patrols do their best to control illegal cutting and fishing practices. Mangroves have been successfully regenerated.

On the down side, government support for enforcement is limited and inconsistent and, outside the confines of community areas, illegal practices continue, such as the use of “light” boats armed with powerful lamps that attract fish. Some fear that commercial dredging of the Koh Kong River – led by powerful Cambodian interests – will damage the mangroves.

As elsewhere in the world, mangrove villagers and their international supporters realize that tourism may be the greatest force for mangrove protection. At least one villager in the area is planning an ecotourism initiative.

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Vandana Shiva

The global food crisis. Suddenly, in the news, it's all the rage. Vandana Shiva has been talking about Earth's food crisis for years. She is one of the world's foremost advocates of farmers rights in the face of biopiracy and agricultural globalization. I spoke with Vandana Shiva at her Navdanya biodiversity farm, in the foothills of the Himalayas north of Dehradun. LISTEN

An Interview with Judith Palmer Harik

Judith Palmer Harik is a political analyst and former professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. She has studied Lebanon's Hezbollah movement since its emergence in the early 1980s, and is the author of Hezbollah -- the Changing Face of Terrorism. I spoke with professor Palmer Harik in late October 2007 -- shortly before U.S.-sponsored "peace talks" in Annapolis, MD -- at her home in the mountains above Beirut.

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Palestinian Youth

Life is tough for the four million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Tiny Gaza is under effective Israeli blockade. West Bank Palestinians are encircled by a continuous, multi-tiered line of concrete walls and electric fences, and can only move freely within Ramallah and smaller towns. Hundreds of checkpoints limit movement elsewhere. These have reduced “terrorist” attacks, Israel says, but Palestinians feel imprisoned.

Young people are particularly affected by the checkpoint system. Boys are sometimes forced to strip, or are beaten. Girls are teased. It can take an entire day to travel short distances. Travel to Jerusalem is out of the question for most. Many youth opt to stay put.

If there’s anything worse than feeling trapped, it’s being misunderstood. In a recent visit to Ramallah’s Quaker-funded Friends School, a group of grade twelve students complained of being depicted as “terrorists” in the mainstream media. Listen to their voices here, together with the voice of Sahar Othman, with the Palestinian youth group Sharek (www.sharek.ps).

Friends School parent and Bir Zeit researcher Rita Giacaman also appears in this voice collage. She has studied the impact of the Israeli occupation, and the checkpoint system, on Palestinian youth. The humiliation they experience at checkpoints, she has written, has added to the trauma inflicted by forty years of occupation and conflict.

Over the past year, Giacaman has spent much time working with young people at Ramallah’s Quaker-founded Friends School. With her motherly assistance, a group of grade twelve students – including her daughter – spent two years producing a Palestinian version of a Shakespeare classic: “In Fair Palestine – the True Story of Romeo and Juliet,” it’s called. A trailer for the film appears on YouTube, and the film was screened for the first time in January, in Ramallah, to a standing room only crowd of a thousand.

It was not the intention of the film’s young creators to depict the star-crossed children of a Palestinian and an Israeli, or of Fatah and Hamas supporters. Instead, their goal was to portray Palestinians as perfectly normal. “We are neither terrorists nor victims,” one of their releases states. “We have known no other life but in war-like conditions. Yet, we are telling the world that, despite extra-ordinary life circumstances, Palestinian youth use their summer holidays to make a film based on a love story … that we are creative, able to put together a film without any previous experience whatsoever. And of course, that we are human, and resilient. We strive to turn negative life events into positive energy.”

The creators of In Fair Palestine: the True Story of Romeo and Juliet have also created an Internet blog (www.lifebehindthewall.org), which they use to communicate with other youth around the world. They are more fortunate than young people living in the northern West Bank communities of Nablus and Jenin – who Rita Giacaman has also worked with – but they are Palestine’s best and brightest, perhaps. Many will be heading off to prestigious U.S. universities next fall, escaping the occupation trap – perhaps to return as leaders in the future.

Land and People

For little Lebanon, geography is a source of both pride and suffering. Its Mediterranean coastline, to the west, is as beautiful as any in the world. Forested mountains along its spine -- rustic villages throughout -- are a visual delight. Further east, the Bekaa valley is among the world's most fertile. However, to the north and east sits Syria, Lebanon's self-appointed big brother, shaping/manipulating Beirut politics. Israel, to the south, has invaded Lebanon three times in the last thirty years, occupying southern Lebanon for an eighteen-year stint. Most recently, in response to a July 2006 attack on a group of its soldiers by the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah (and the capture of two), Israel launched a thirty-three day aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the final 72 hours of the conflict -- after a tentative cease fire had been arranged -- Israel covered southern Lebanon with tens of thousands of cluster munitions. These munitions continue to pose a major hazard. They hamper the field work of Lebanese farmers, restricting their harvests and placing them in an even more precarious situation (given the scant support they receive from Lebanon's clannish, corrupt and neoliberal elite). I traveled to southern Lebanon in the company of Rami Zurayk, a professor at the American University of Beirut. Zurayk's Land and People group provides strategic marketing and technical services to Lebanese farmers, helping them carve out a niche, effectively brand their unique farm products and earn more money, whilst sustaining natural resources and strengthening Lebanons rural social fabric.

Dharavi

Dharavi is a 200 hectare teardrop of land in the heart of Mumbai, home to almost a million people. This is where India's -- and the world's -- largest city began, as a cluster of mud islands. Generations of settlement, by waves of migrants from throughout India, have turned Dharavi into the "largest slum in Asia." But Dharavi is not your typical slum. The people of Dharavi -- really, a collection of communities sandwiched between Mumbai's two rail lines -- are highly productive. Most of Mumbai's solid waste is recycled here, and Dharavi is famous for its leatherwork, pottery and other cottage industries. Its narrow streets are packed with shops of all kinds. But Dharavi services are poor, and there's plenty of squalor. The Indian government's Slum Rehabilitation Authority has come up with improvement/redevelopment plans over the years. Now, with real estate values sky-high in Mumbai, and a major shopping district on the drawing boards just north of Dharavi, a multi-billion dollar redevelopment plan is now in the works, featuring highrises, shopping centers and prime office space. Trouble is, Dharavi residents are not being consulted. The idea is to divide Dharavi into five sectors, to be developed under international tender. People who've lived in Dharavi since 1995 will be entitled to 225 square feet (in a high-rise). But this will be nowhere near enough for Dharavi's ground-level cottage industries, which the Sector Redevelopment Plan may leave out in the cold

Singing on Mumbai's Western Line

This is recorded on a packed train car in Mumbai. A woman is slowly walking through the car with a small child in her arms. She's singing a song, accompanying herself on what sound like spoons. Can you make out the words she's singing?