Abby Seiff on the Slow Death of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake
For centuries, the Great Lake has nourished Cambodians and captivated foreign observers – but its days may be numbered.
By Sebastian Strangio
March 01, 2022

Cambodia’s Great Lake – the Tonle Sap – is in trouble. The lake and its residents face the converging impacts of global climate change, upstream hydropower dams, and illegal fishing abetted by government corruption. All have combined to threaten the lake’s nourishing flood-pulse, which for centuries has sustained the world’s largest inland fishery and provided Cambodians with their primary source of protein.

In a new book, “Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia,” based on years of reporting around the Tonle Sap, writer and journalist Abby Seiff examines the “perfect storm” of challenges facing the lake and those that dwell on and around its waters. She spoke with The Diplomat about the unique ecology of the Great Lake and whether there is any hope of its long-term survival.

For centuries, detailed descriptions to the Tonle Sap have filled the reports and journals penned by foreign visitors to Cambodia. Can you describe what has prompted this attention? What is unique about Cambodia’s “Great Lake”?

When you look back at these historical, outsider descriptions – whether we’re talking about the Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan in the 1290s, or the French polymath George Groslier in the 1920s – there’s invariably a real sense of awe at the sheer size of the lake and the amount of fish. I think in the book I used the word breathless, and that’s the tone of so many of these accounts. Whether these visitors are accessing the lake on foot or by boat, via the Tonle Sap river, there’s inevitably a moment when the lake unfurls before them and it’s like an ocean: just absolutely massive.


And then of course the second aspect is the fisheries. They’re talking about fish as big as whales, and fish that are so abundant people just walk to the bank and scoop out their dinner with a wicker basket. There’s too many species to name, not just of fish but of birds and crocodiles and turtles and so forth. And then, of course, looming over all of this is the “double movement” of the lake, as the French colonial explorer Lieutenant Jules Marcel Brossard de Corbigny put it. The lake expands and contracts with the seasons and they’re witnessing the movement that happens with that; banks overflowing, trees being submerged by the water, whole floating villages following the water. Who couldn’t be stunned by all of this?
Full article/interview: https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/abby-se ... -sap-lake/

Tonle Sap Lake Fish Face Extinction
BY: Mao Sopha and Sam Sopich March 11, 2022 5:57 PM

PHNOM PENH--Fish will disappear from the Tonle Sap Lake in two years if steps are not taken to end illegal fishing, Royal Academy of Cambodia president Sok Touch says.

He spoke after a second visit to the lake where last year he found that tens of thousands of hectares of flooded forest had been illegally occupied, including by government officials.

This month, he expressed grave concern over the destruction of fish in the lake by illegal fishing by people, including ethnic Vietnamese.

After receiving a report from Sok Touch last year, the government ordered the confiscation of flooded forest areas which had been seized illegally.

Returning this month, Sok Touch was worried by illegal fishing. Fishing during spawning and electric fishing posed a high risk of fish loss, he said. Using chemicals​ and pesticides for rice fields along the lake kills fish.

He also took aim at Vietnamese communities who fish in the river.

“You come to live in my land, you become rich in our nation, so why are you destroying fish in my river?” he said.

“You commit illegal fishing by the electric shock with the speedboat in a 60-square-meter area and drag the fish, while the small fish you turn to make fertilizer. How can I tolerate your actions?”.

He said these activities can lead to the destruction of fish in the lake. He called for an end to all such activities to keep fish prospering.

“I can say that if we don’t have any mechanism to prevent illegal fishing, the fish in Tonle Sap Lake will be extinct in the next two years.” he said.

Touch pointed to laws that nets must be 3cm square or more and that netting in flooded forests or during the spawning season is illegal.
https://cambodianess.com/article/tonle- ... extinction

BOOK REVIEW — “Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia,” by Abby Seiff (Potomac Books, 162 pages).

Book Review: Elegy to a Rapidly Vanishing Lake
In “Troubling the Water,” Abby Seiff chronicles the threats to a vast Cambodian lake and the people who live there.
By Lina Tran
04.01.2022

According to Cambodian lore, the ocean was once ruled by the king of the Naga empire. The Naga were an amphibious people who made their home between land and water. A prince discovered this underworld when he traveled to an island and met its princess on the shore. Naturally, they fell in love. After the prince proved his mettle, the king blessed their marriage by swallowing the ocean, revealing the land below. “The land born of water was Cambodia,” writes journalist Abby Seiff in her new book, “Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia.”

Cambodia’s deep connection to water — culturally, ecologically, economically — is at the heart of Seiff’s book. It’s an elegy to Tonle Sap Lake, Southeast Asia’s largest body of freshwater and one of the world’s richest inland fisheries. Fed by a branch of the Mekong River, the lake is more of an inland sea, one that shrinks and swells, up to six times its size, with the dry and rainy seasons. But dams, overfishing, and climate change threaten this ancient rhythm. Fish are vanishing from the lake. On Tonle Sap, Seiff shows, this risks an entire way of life.

A unique water cycle underlies the riches of Tonle Sap Lake. The lake depends on the Tonle Sap River, a tributary of the Mekong in the dry season, itself one of the most biodiverse river basins in the world, second only to the Amazon. Twice a year, the Tonle Sap River reverses itself. It’s the only river in the world to do so, Seiff writes. It starts in May, when the rainy season kicks off. Monsoons flood the Mekong, sending a wall of water — and with it, silt and nutrients — down the Tonle Sap and into the lake. The lake swallows the land, leaving only treetops to gesture to the plain below. Residents anchor their rafted homes to the submerged tree trunks, and entire villages take float. Then, come November, the rain tapers off and the Mekong subsides. The lake, swollen with rainwater, pours into its parent river and back into the Mekong. Floating homes settle back onto their stilts.

“Scientists call that a monotonal flood-pulsed system; poets liken it to a beating heart,” Seiff writes. The flood pulses are as essential to the region and national identity as a heartbeat is to a body. Once, they fed the ancient city of Angkor, whose ruins sit on the north side of the lake. Today, rice paddies dot the floodplains and fish is the main protein for an estimated 80 percent of the country. Fishers draw in heaps of riel, the small, oily, silvery fish that bears the same name as the national currency. They’re processed into the fermented paste prahok, a mainstay of Cambodian cooking.

But the heartbeat is weakening. Climate change has strengthened the droughts that grip the region. Without rainfall, there’s nothing to power the pulse. For the past decade, the Mekong’s water levels, and in turn, Tonle Sap’s, have steadily declined. In the searing heat, many villagers are facing wildfires for the first time in their lives.
More: https://undark.org/2022/04/01/book-revi ... the-water/

Three Institutions Tasked to Restore Tonle Sap Lake to Conserve Fish Species
AKP Phnom Penh, May 27, 2022 --

Prime Minister Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo HE has tasked three institutions to work together to restore and deepen the Tonle Sap bed aiming to conserve fish species.

In a special statement delivered on May 27, Samdech Techo HE said that from year to year, the Tonle Sap becomes shallower due to the influx of sediment and fallen tree leaves into the lake.

The Premier ordered the Tonle Sap Authority, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and the Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology to jointly work with authorities of the provinces surrounding the Tonle Sap on the lake bed restoration.

“Normally, during the rainy season, the water always brings sediment in the Tonle Sap area with fallen leaves, making our Tonle Sap Lake shallower, therefore make it difficult for fish conservation,” he said.

Additionally, Samdech Techo HE instructed relevant ministries and institutions to study the possibility of processing the sediment in the Tonle Sap Lake into agricultural fertiliser.
- AKP

Fish species in the Reangpen Conservation Area halved due to weather problems and loss of flooded forest
30/05/2022 3:00 pm
By: Nhem Chan

Battambang: The Reang Pen Conservation Lake area in the management area of ​​the fishing community under the Ministry of Forestry in Ek Phnom district is estimated to have 15 tons of fish species ready to spawn when the Tonle Sap River arrives. Mr. Phi Hoeut, President of the fishing community under the Ministry of Agriculture, said that the lake used to have about 30 tons of fish species per year, but due to climate change, the amount of fish species has been reduced by half.

Mr. Phi Hoeut, President of the fishing community under the Ministry of Agriculture, which has preserved the Reang Pen 3 area in Sdei Krom village, Prek Luong commune, Ek Phnom district, said that this conservation area started operating in 2007 because the fishing community took care to protect the fish species and make the fish grow from year to year. But in the last two years, due to climate change, the Tonle Sap water regime has not reached the conservation lake, causing less fish to be able to spawn during the spawning season, and the man-made encroachment into flooding forests around the conservation lake has also caused loss of many spawning fish habitats.

However, Mr. Phi Hoeut said that the community is still working to protect the conservation of fish breeds to leave to the next generation of family fishermen, especially as there is more demand for fish than ever.
He hopes that in the future, natural fish in the Tonle Sap region will increase after the Royal Government takes measures to eliminate fishing crimes and confiscate flooded forest land from criminals who occupied the area three years ago.

To know more, please watch the video below:

https://thmeythmey25.com/detail/92350

Incomes dry up for farmers on Cambodia’s huge lake
By Sao Phal Niseiy
25 July 2022 at 8:04
Water shortages, soil degradation and rising chemical costs add to hardships on Southeast Asia’s biggest freshwater lake.

PHNOM PENH – Life has never been easy for farmers along Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake – the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia – and now water shortages, soil degradation and the rising costs for chemicals have added to their hardships.

“Each season, the most challenging problems we farmers commonly face are a lack of finance and water,” said Reth Pheach, 50, who has land in Sa Kream commune in Kampong Thom province.

Sitting under a dilapidated wooden house about 80 kilometers from the Tonle Sap Lake, he added: “In the past, we did not have water shortages. We rarely had droughts, but now the weather has become unpredictable. I don’t know why this happens.”

For Pheach, the decreasing fertility of the soil is seen as a natural process and his only answer is to use more chemicals if he wants to farm out of season. Increasing his use of chemicals is the only way to maintain his yields.

Located near Siem Reap and the famous temple complexes around Angkor Wat, the Tonle Sap Lake is 250 kilometers long and 100 kilometers across at its widest point. It has one of the most diverse and productive ecosystems in the world, prompting the UNESCO to designate the area a Biosphere Reserve in 1997.

The huge lake operates on what’s known as a flood pulse system, in which the lake gets its water from the Tole Sap River – one of few rivers in the world that reverses its flow every year.

During the six-month dry season from December to April, the Mekong River level drops and the water from the Tonle Sap Lake flows back down the Tonle Sap River and back into the Mekong.

As the Mekong River swells with monsoon rain, it pushes water up the Tonle Sap River to the lake that expands six times its size.

But climate change combined with other factors, including new hydropower dams along the Mekong River, have resulted in lower water levels in the lake. Since 2018, the water level has been lower than its historical average, according to a report by the Mekong River Commission.

These changes mean farmers have endured reduced land productivity, resulting in a heavy reliance on chemicals to maintain yields, with the extra costs adding to their difficulties. Inadequate irrigation has added to the farmer’s problems.

Abby Seiff, an American journalist who worked at The Cambodia Daily and The Phnom Penh Post and the author of the book Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia, agreed that the biggest and most important freshwater lake in Southeast Asia is in trouble.

It has suffered existential threats including substantial loss of flooded forests, hydrological changes as well as from the climate crisis, she said.

She noted that the change in hydrology – the change in the way the water moves in and out of the lake – had impacts on not only the lake’s ecosystem, but also on the farmlands around it.

“During the wet season, the whole flood plain surrounding the lake is flooded – not just with water but with nutrient-rich sediment, which is very important for paddy rice,” she said.

“So, the changing hydrology doesn’t just affect the lake’s fisheries, but it impacts the agriculture surrounding the lake.”
Full article: https://www.mekongeye.com/2022/07/25/in ... huge-lake/

Tonle Sap - Interview with Hay Sreang about decline in fishing

Southeast Asia Globe
25 July 2022

Long read article: The small cuts bleeding Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake
https://southeastasiaglobe.com/the-smal ... -sap-lake/