Cambodia’s water people pushed out of Phnom Penh sewer for billion-dollar ING City
For decades, the vast lakes and wetlands fringing Cambodia’s capital have been home to thousands of people making a living from the water — fishing and harvesting vegetables for market. Now they face eviction, as politically well-connected land speculators push them out. “If they fill in the lakes I am not sure where we will go,” says Pov as she works along the ropes strung on the water’s surface, cutting mimosa and morning glory. Pov first started making her living here a decade ago, and even though the lakes form the city’s main sewerage treatment system, she says the water was clean enough to bathe in. “It smells now. In the past it was not like this,” Pov says while breaking off handfuls of mimosa and throwing them in a pile in her boat. “Some of us get strange itches. A friend’s hands, arms and legs became swollen because of the water.” Phnom Penh is in the grip of a real estate explosion, with sky-high glass towers rising from millions of tonnes of sand pumped from the Mekong and other rivers into what was once a chain of huge wetlands.
