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- My name is Matt Blomberg,
I'm a investigative journalist in Cambodia.
Four years ago, I was a sports reporter in Australia.
That was my goal in life,
and then I came here on a holiday.
I didn't want to go home,
so I applied for a job at The Cambodia Daily.
There's not much professional sport here, so
I got sucked into the world of
corruption and investigation and scandal.
There's a lot of different people
using a lot of different methods to try and confront
injustices all over the world.
For me, the most effective way is with a pen and a camera.
From Phnom Penh I was following the story about illegal fishing
and starting to get little bits of stories
about the lawlessness at sea.
And then one day
I heard that a Cambodian man was killed
in a clash of Vietnamese fishermen.
To where?
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah for sure.
So I went down and visited the village,
met the widow,
Then started, you know,
poking around the villages and asking questions.
- Was there any justice for the death of Auok?
- The governors think they are wrong.
- At this point, I hadn't seen anything myself.
So I went and asked the captain to take me out.
It's a really volatile situation
because there's so many fishing villages
who are all living off the same patch of ocean.
There's hundreds of boats that go out every night.
There's these fishing communities all along the coast.
The scale is massive.
He says that all these
boats with their lights off are Vietnamese and that,
this is Cambodian water for a little bit more.
So that's everything off the sea floor.
Everything.
I watched them drag hundreds of kilos worth of sea life
onto the boat.
20% of it is put into buckets
that are going to be sold at market later
and then the rest of it,
the stuff that wasn't worth any money, just died.
Their yields are down exponentially every year.
The yields are dropping and dropping and dropping.
It's a race to the bottom.
The more villages I went to,
I just kept hearing the same story.
There's no fish left,
that the Vietnamese had taken all the fish
and that the local fishermen are powerless to stop them.
If you have a look at the maps, you can see that
Thailand in the west and Vietnam in the east,
their waters have been fished out.
The Vietnamese have pillaged their own oceans and
the fishing fleets from there are moving into Cambodia.
There's billions of dollars worth of seafood
exported from Southeast Asia every year.
And so, a lot of people around the world
are affected by the things that happen here.
In Cambodia, things are pretty desperate.
It became apparent very quickly how serious this issue is.
If this problem is not addressed, it's only a matter
of time before there's no fisheries in Cambodia at all.
Hundreds of thousands of people's
livelihoods are on the line.
Through talking to the fishermen down there,
I found out about
this vigilante British guy who was living on an island
off the coast and
doing his best to try and keep the illegal fishers at bay.
So, I'm thinking to myself,
"Who is this guy Paul?"
- At least one set of Vietnamese pair trawlers,
First one,
somewhere between 500 meters and 1 kilometre
north of Koh Seh. Now we...
- Paul's strategy is to flood Facebook with
live streams when he's out on patrol.
- Oh there he is, throwing stuff!
Live on Facebook! Here we go, chasing the boat.
- 90% of Cambodians
see Facebook as their lead source of information.
And he knows that pretty high ranking people are watching,
- Okay here we are, continuous offenders.
- And that if he keeps slapping them in the face
someone will react eventually.
- Guy's waving an axe at us.
- The illegal fishermen are notoriously violent.
They go to work armed with machetes and slingshots
and homemade guns and anyone who gets in their way,
they're willing to use those weapons.
They've rammed boats, they've sunk boats,
they've launched coordinated attacks even.
- 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 electric trawlers
trying to ram our boat right now.
- Obviously I was quite interested in it,
so I went down there looking for him.
I also heard that Paul
wasn't very keen on talking to the media.
His staff told me, you know, he doesn't like journalists.
The small one has all the cameras and some stuff in it.
How're you doing, Paul?
My first impression was that
getting along with Paul will be difficult.
What I wanted to do
was to get into a position where we can share information.
- Nothing else to do.
- But it took me a little while
to even gain his attention.
- I approached him and sat down and
slowly started chatting to him.
No, it's okay. We've done all the
research we've been doing it first...
And I guess I won his trust in the end.
At the end, at the end.
Yeah, yeah. It was like, that was exactly...
- At the very beginning when these little seahorse trawlers
came over from Vietnam,
this was what the bycatch looked like.
So it was a really, really sensitive habitats
that hadn't been disturbed.
So you've got, that's a, say a 30 minute trawl,
and they have that much life in it.
This is exact, almost the same trawler
and that's what they catch now.
So the first one was, I think 2008,
so they get, and that will be maybe a two hour trawl.
It's pretty crazy how little there is now left.
But I've got to say,
the Vietnamese ones must be working hard..
Matt contacted me
and I gave him a bit of information about things
and we talked and it sort of progressed from there.
The other and he's like,
"If I had this and if I had this..."
Twelve years ago, I was a diver,
I loved the ocean and I came to Cambodia
to work as a dive instructor.
It was a very small island.
Just off the coast of Sihanoukville, called Koh Koun.
When the ocean started being destroyed,
no one else was there to stop it
and I was there.
There wasn't really a choice, it had to be done.
So, that was when I started Marine Conservation Cambodia.
- We started out to protect the seahorses here
and the more we started to work with the community,
the more we understood how little fish were left
and it became much more about
protecting the community and the whole marine environment.
We worked on getting the illegal sand dredging banned.
We ran a clinic.
We ran a small English school, for the local kids.
It was very successful.
And the deputy governor
basically asked if we were interested in doing,
in the ocean here in Kep,
exactly what we'd done there.
And so, we set up MCC here in Kep,
and then we began work.
- MCC has a very small area in front of Koh Seh,
the island that they populate.
- We have the conservation area
that we've officially been granted
by the provincial government.
- And it's surrounded on three sides by Vietnam.
- Essentially we really are
smack bang on the front line.
- This is the border, right here,
between Cambodia and Vietnam.
This is our medium boat.
This is the boat that we go patrolling on.
Phon is the captain on the boat.
- We run the patrols
to stop the trawling boats
from going into the marine conservation areas.
Three electric boats,
Clearly know they're in the wrong.
They're running from our boat right now.
- They also have an extensive research program
that follows the seahorse populations in the area.
MCC is a really grassroots operation.
Y'know they're all living on a thread out there.
For Paul, every time he wakes up in the morning,
he's risking everything.
'Cause he's got his family, he's got five kids and a wife
living on that small island with him.
- Hello everybody. - Hello everybody.
- So can you give us hundreds of money, all your moneys.
- You guys love being live, don't you?
- Papa I want to say something too.
- What do you want to say? What'd you want to say?
- Whoever is watching me right now,
please help me to save this island and this ocean.
- That was so sweet.
If we can protect this area,
this tiny little oasis of recovery,
then we can expand everything,
encompassing a much larger conservation area
called an MFMA,
which is a Marine Fisheries Management Area.
And essentially within that you then have zones that allow
a breeding season to happen without the interference,
conservation zones, which are entirely no take.
If you've got the conservation zones
and they're fully protected,
you have areas for the fish to move out.
First year you have no fish,
then you have a few fish,
because you have a few,
you have a few more the next year.
Once it gets to a certain point,
there's so much life there that breeds and produces
new offspring that it explodes
and spawns other areas of recovery.
And research has to be done
to back up everything that we're doing.
- So basically,
after having seeing lots of different individuals
but without being able to identify them,
it's very hard to differentiate different seahorses.
So if you want to be able to track
the evolution of a single individual inside the coral reef
then we need some kind of way to identify it.
Today we have the pink and the green,
which hopefully will have a good mark under water.
Alright, let's go.
- Amick leads the research and
the scientific side of operations.
He is bringing in volunteers and divers
and scientists to help do the monitoring of the water.
- If we do the research to prove
to the provincial government
that the work that we're doing is working,
then we can take this to the entire archipelago
to protect all of the essential habitats that need to be
under the umbrella of this MFMA.
Around 2008,
Cambodia's diving equaled what people now think of as
the best diving sites in the world.
Where divers from all over the world go to do photography
to find the craziest critters that no one else sees.
The seahorse was the thing that I enjoyed spending
most of my time in the water with.
They're incredibly beautiful to watch.
Because of Cambodia's recent history, the genocide,
they'd been untouched by industrial fishing.
Seahorses were pretty much everywhere.
And then a few years later
we had this huge influx of Vietnamese boats
targeting the seahorses in the inshore areas.
The trawling boats were increasing
and you'd go to a dive site
and you'd been diving there for six months, seven months,
and you knew the area, it was beautiful,
and all of a sudden you go down
just looks like someone had just taken a bulldozer to it.
There's absolutely nothing left whatsoever.
You've got bare sand, crushed shells,
half dead things everywhere
it was just... it was horrific.
They've got their nets laid out
because they're all the same flags.
We started out
and the illegal fishing was worse than in Sihanoukville.
Sihanoukville was bad,
but here was pretty much like the Wild West.
They're actually illegal.
All the boats work with complete impunity.
Yeah, so if you look at the mesh size of this net,
this net's actually illegal.
You can get a look at the size of the fish in this net,
it's like a mosquito net.
All tiny juvenile fish.
One illegal boat pulling everything up.
Nothing escapes those nets.
- MCC has managed
to gain some kind of trust with the government
to be allowed to go in and
tackle the illegal fishing that goes on there,
but they're walking a very fine line between
doing what is right and
pleasing the people who hold the key to their existence.
- Anyone got a camera that's got a good zoom on it?
It looks like a 18 to 20 person Vietnamese IUU boat.
We've got to turn around now.
Basically the police have stopped us
from coming into this area
and all these Vietnamese boats know that
and that's where they run to.
- MCC is essentially doing what the police
and the fisheries are supposed to be doing.
The trawlers have operated with impunity for at least 10 years.
Bottom trawling is where
they drop a net off the back of the boat
and inside the front of the net are these timber sleds
that drive the net down into the ocean floor.
And then the net is dragged along the ocean floor
for kilometres.
And scoops and smashes
everything that it passes over.
- Oh, look at all that sea grass.
All the seagrass on that boat.
That whole pile is seagrass.
- When there's nothing left on the bottom to catch.
Then there's the electric version of those.
- Electric trawling is just your average standard trawler,
but they connect an electric cable to the net
that goes through a copper wire
and then they send a thousand volt pulse
down into the water and
electrocute everything as they go.
Anything that's been electrocuted
by one of those nets
dies within 48 hours.
And so, as they go along taking all of the fish
they're also taking with it all of the habitat.
So there can't be any regeneration.
Yeah.
Here he is with all the sea grass in the net,
yeah, same guy, he just doesn't care.
- And then there's the pair trawler,
it can be nets hundreds of meters long
slung between two massive boats
and then dragged through swathes of ocean kilometres,
it can wipe out acres of underwater habitat in one night.
The pair trawlers in Cambodia come from Vietnam.
This we know, there's no Cambodian pair trawlers.
- Vietnam pair trawler.
That's Koh Puh there, Koh Mak Prang.
There's the two pair trawler.
- It's the most destructive thing
that I've come across within the ocean so far,
so that's why it's really essential that we
stop the trawling bags from going in to the protected area.
- Are you going to...
- You just wait, wait here.
This is the idea of the blocks.
We deploy them under water.
The idea is to come up to about seven blocks high.
If it's seven blocks high
it will weigh just over three tons.
The blocks have two main purposes, which is
to create artificial habitat
and also to function as an anti trawling device
to stop the illegal trawlers.
And we're mixing them all by hand so,
we've made about 200 so far.
This is our mixing and making station.
We can do everything by hand.
We don't have to worry about heavy machinery,
high labor costs.
We build with very basic materials.
Essentially it's a very adaptable system.
- I just see all the possibilities of this place
and it's just waiting to bloom
and develop into something incredible.
It has to be all good.
Maybe, one of or two of you could bring a bench
and you can just sit in a circle.
Just a practice, we do that for fun.
We're going to discuss why we think which fish is who,
the shape of the fish, his color,
his behaviors help us decipher what fish it is.
- Conservation is far from
anywhere near the top of the agenda for most Cambodians,
but we met a couple of
Cambodian students over there doing research.
- All right. What is it?
- Yes. Very good.
Gold fish.
- They're here to do their thesis.
And they are beginning an early testing and monitoring program
for the block systems that we'd like to implement
for the MFMA on a much larger scale.
I've always thought this isn't,
this isn't a job for foreigners,
it's going to be Cambodian people
that make the changes here.
They can do this so much more efficiently than we can.
- Vida and Rachana are swimming against the tide.
They will tell you that their parents
didn't want them to get involved in this stuff.
And they'll also tell you that the university professors
advised them against it because
it's just not seen as a stable career here.
- This is a good example,
this story is a absolutely flagrant abuse
of the fisheries law.
Hundreds of Vietnamese fishermen
floating around in these little cane baskets,
taking hundreds of kilos of squid out of the Cambodian water
every single day
and paying those who are supposed to be stopping them
for the privilege.
It took us a few days to find them
because they're way out in the open ocean.
But when we did, they told us everything.
They told us who they pay, how much they pay,
and it all checked out.
I haven't been back looking for the Vietnamese guys,
but I would bet that they're still there.
I also would bet that
this story caused some problems for some people,
because all these guys are named.
As a Western journalist, you have to be very cautious
with the way that you approach stories because
you have a completely different angle on everything.
You get people saying, you know,
"What are you doing interfering, it's not your business?"
And, you know, there's some elements of that argument
that I can agree with.
But at the same time,
a great part of the reason why I do this work is because
I've become so attached to the country.
It has become my home.
Thank you.
I have a much stronger connection to this place
and these people than I do to even Australia.
And what happens here does actually affect me.
I know that I'm privileged and lucky
to be able to do what I do.
And I feel like I have a duty to use my skills
as best as I can to try to improve the situation.
- How are you? - Good.
- And it's a wonderful opportunity
to have Matt here again from The Cambodia Daily.
- I moved out to Cambodia from Australia in 2012.
One of the things that I saw was the unsustainable depletion
of the natural resources of Cambodia.
There's great resources here
in the forest and in the ocean particularly,
and they're all being exploited improperly.
Who here wants to be a journalist?
It's gotten worse since last year.
- It's gotten worse.
- Yeah.
- Why doesn't anyone want to be a journalist?
- Because here for, I think, for Cambodians, like,
we see investigative journalism
as sort of, pretty life threatening.
Like, it bars people from it.
- This is like the class for journalism in Cambodia right?
If you're not here, you're not. - Right.
- Yeah.
It's kind of not, not that easy for Cambodians
to stand up and say,
"That's wrong" and "that's wrong"
when it is.
If you do this job
and it doesn't look like many of you want to do it,
but it's a really rewarding kind of job.
It's exciting.
Organizations put together lists
of countries that are most dangerous to be journalists in.
And Cambodia recently was named the most dangerous place
to be an environmental journalist.
Over the years we've seen a number
of environmental activists and political commentators
murdered, some in cold blood in broad daylight.
- One of Asia's leading environmental activists
was gunned down in Cambodia.
- The local reporters are much more at risk
than we foreigners are.
Deleting a foreigner isn't going to be swept under the carpet
like deleting a local activist can be.
So in some senses, I guess I often feel like
I have a responsibility to the local reporters.
If something goes wrong,
I can pack my bag and go,
but the local reporters, they can't.
- Oh, here we go.
Morning.
- Hot, sweaty.
Chasing illegal boats this morning on the way back,
nearly didn't make it on time.
- Yeah. that's been my main work.
I have the guys that all focus on the research, but
I tend to spend most of my time with, on the
sort of, legal fishing and the IUU.
- It's better but it's harder.
I've been on this personally for around eight years
and I was financing it from businesses that I had
and we can see the finish line,
we've just got to this point where
basically I've run out of money.
I mean, I've sold my land, I've sold my house,
I've sold everything.
And I'm now at a point where we,
we basically struggling just to buy the food every day.
So we applied to the conservation fund of Canada
for an emergency grant
so that we could basically continue the patrols,
which was $3000 a month
to cover fuel and the patrol team
and then an extra thousand for
like, maintenance and stuff like that.
- Yeah.
Oof.
- I found out that one Cambodian fishing village
on the coast has gone particularly militant.
Prek Tanin, or "Shock Village" as it's known locally,
is just a few K's from MCC's Island.
And I'd heard that
they've electrified all their nets.
See this blue electric,
this blue wire down here,
that's electric.
This chain runs around the mouth of the net
and then this electric current is hooked onto the chain.
They'll tell us that
that electric wire is for their lights and stuff but
right here we can see that
it's hooked up to the mouth of the trawling net.
They know that we're here
collecting information so that's...
we collected the right information that means.
Getting kicked out is always a good sign, right?
- Oh wait, you're together.
- Don't show it.
Don't show yet.
- Aren't you playing Braiden?
Okay, let's do it.
Start the engine.
Just be careful.
There's something a little bit strange about them.
They have their light on and they're signaling to us.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right here!
Okay, let's bring it in!
This way! This way! This way!
Here! Here! Here!
- Ah man!
That kills my heart man!
- Bring him out! Bring him out! Bring him out!
- He's dead already!
- He's not breathe-
Oh yes! He breathes! He breathes!
- Get it in the ocean!
- You got to go, you got to go in there.
- Come on. - Come on
- You've got to breathe, man.
- Come on, you need to breathe!
- Hey, hey.
- Bok. Bok. Bok. Bok. Bok.
Bok!
Come back here. We take the net, you quiet.
Small scale! Dude!
Small scale! Bok!
Alright. Take all those needle fish off this boat.
Come sit down
- Was it a good catch tonight?
Just take time.
I'm sorry I can't make it any faster.
I'd like to make it faster, but I can't. You know?
Maybe he wants to give his phone number or
take the phone number from one of you yeah,
so when he hear the pair trawler or the Vietnamese boats come in,
he can call to us we can inform or help him.
I think is good.
- Damn. - Yeah we raised those fish.
- Yeah we did.
- Small scale fishermen have been here since
the area was repopulated after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
A large portion of Cambodians still live in severe poverty.
The fishermen who are scrapping for their survival every day
are left to kind of fight amongst themselves,
which is so sad.
- Small scale fishermen use methods that
aren't that destructive and are sustainable.
But then you have the illegal fishermen from Vietnam
and the electric boats come into Cambodia
and take as many fish
as a small fishermen would take in months.
So the Cambodian fishermen upgrade
to using electric trawlers, just to keep up.
- I was having a discussion with an illegal fishermen one time
and I was sat on the boat in all my righteousness of,
"Your children aren't going to have any fish."
This guy turned around to me and went,
"Well, if I don't catch the fish today,
I won't have any children."
I can't answer that.
If you don't feed the kids, kids die.
He's not thinking about tomorrow or the next day,
or what these kids will have in the future.
So, it changed me and it changed my mentality.
I absolutely adore my kids.
I'm the luckiest man on the planet
to have such wonderful kids.
But, bringing up kids in the world that we live in
is hard. So hard.
Our societies are built on so many of the wrong criteria.
This all washed in today.
- But I hope that
growing up the way they have,
they will all be advocates and ambassadors of nature.
- Tiny little fish baby. Wow.
- They're interested in nature.
They're interesting in how nature works.
They ask all the right questions.
- Sometimes the kids ask me questions that
properly make me cry
because I don't have an answer for them.
- But I hope that they will realize that
our natural world is more important than anything
because without it, what do we have?
My kids make me feel like I have to continue
Like, I have to be an example to them.
- Happy New Year!
- We want to conserve the environment
and at the same time we want to bring some culture,
Cambodian culture, into the conservation.
- Guys go! 1, 2, 3!
- I want to see it recover.
I want to see happy long-tail fishermen fishing legally,
catching great big crabs.
I want to see the little communities
becoming communities again
where they don't have to move away to get jobs
where they can just go into the ocean.
I want to go diving and see the stuff that should be there.
I want to see blue water every day
cause it's not foul and disgusting
from being dragged up with the trawlers.
It could be beautiful.
It was beautiful once.
- We've got 25 minutes.
For years I'd heard that
the Vietnamese pair trawlers fishing in Cambodia
come from the island of Phu Quoc,
which on a map appears to be in Cambodian water
but is in fact Vietnamese.
So, I wanted to see what was actually happening there.
And there's a lot of strange underwater creatures
for sale there that you can pick out of a tank and then eat.
What's that guy?
Shark, yeah?
Kinda looks like a reef shark.
Come have a look at the colors on these Stingrays.
- You want to take a picture?
- Eco tours, hey? - Yeah.
- So can you do a tour into the ocean or not?
- Nah.
- Why?
- Overfishing? Really?
You know about the fishermen going into Cambodia?
- Wow.
- Yeah we just get in the evening.
- From the boat? - Yes...
- Okay. and they go to the, across the river here?
- Yes from the ocean.
- I want to see the boat.
When the boat comes back to the village.
What would be a good time to go?
- Morning.
- Morning?
Oh, they come back in the morning.
- They come back in the morning after they catch the fish.
- Okay, good luck man.
I'll see you.
Thank you.
These things are slowly dying.
Pregnant seahorse.
Big fella too.
I found a fishing village
that is said to be the hub for the giant pair trawlers.
Oh yeah, there it is.
- One boat fishes, one brings ice.
One fishes and one brings ice.
Those guys on the second boat over: "No photos, no photos."
How are you man?
You can see the size of the nets.
Hundreds and hundreds of meters worth of nets.
One of these boats can come into Cambodia
and take as many fish as a small trawler would take in months.
It's industrial fishing on a large scale.
Cambodians and Vietnamese,
they're not competing on a level playing field.
These commercial scale trawlers are
undoubtedly coming across the border
and harvesting millions of dollars worth of Cambodian fish
that subsistence fishermen in Cambodia need just to get by.
Which is why the trawlers of Prek Tanin in Cambodia
have wired their nets with electric
because there's simply nothing left for them to catch.
We're managing to prove that the blocks are working.
The next step is for the MFMA to be agreed upon
by all of the different stakeholders,
the local fishing communities, fishers,
various different levels of government,
which then allows us to continue to do work on the plan.
- But now I'm working for Paul
on communication with the communities
and the fishermen about the MFMA and it's really good.
- More than this? - Yeah, more than this,
Yeah.
Do you know who's making them now?
Are they buying them from Vietnam or
other people in Cambodia are you making them?
- Vietnam - Vietnam sir.
- Do you ever,
the fishermen that you arrest
do they ever get angry?
The head of the Kampot fisheries, Sorin,
he's one of these new breed
of officials who have come into government
looking to concentrate on issues
that just haven't been a focus for the government
in years past.
- The fisheries are almost fatally hamstrung
by a lack of resources,
which kind of leaves a gap for people like Paul.
- So, this was our original request,
so it was four different zones,
which equaled out to 5 kilometers
away from the islands.
We've got this conservation area agreed
but we making it square so it makes it slightly bigger.
- Yeah.
- The Koh Pu and Mak Prang one we cut down,
which covers the seagrass and Mak Prang,
We're talking about 70 square kilometers
- Okay. - Together.
- And you get four islands in... - We get four islands in yeah.
Four islands with Koh Seh and Mak Prang.
- Things can move really, really slowly in Cambodian bureaucracy.
- Oh yeah. Cool.
So that's the idea.
It will still has to go through the consultations
so it will change slightly but...
so yeah, got to get it done now.
- We were able to publish a number of stories about
conservation and destruction of the ocean
which is something that hadn't been written about a lot.
- My work and Paul's work I guess kind of work together.
Paul does something and then I write a story about it
and then we publish it and then more people know about it.
And their story is slowly starting to get out there.
I suppose it was seahorses
that started everything.
I spent a long time with them.
They sort of get to know you,
you can spend a long time photographing and videoing them.
I developed a sort of relationship...
- Mmh
It was really, really hard to choose,
like between something that was chunky, heavy, and solid
or something that was like light and fast.
Its looking very, very nice.
It's beautiful isn't it?
- So you can just drive it straight
into some of these trawlers.
- But they've done a beautiful job.
They got a little bit on the front.
The International Conservation Fund of Canada
managed to supply funds to buy a speed boat.
Who knows about this?
- Up until a couple of days ago, absolutely no one.
Now, Sorin and all his team know,
they've seen all the pictures.
Pardon?
This one?
Yeah, yeah, they're going to change that.
- Hey, Sorin.
- Tie that boat, bring it back.
Heading straight in towards us, now he's see our boat coming
he's turned around he's try to run back to Vietnam.
Good job, dad!
- You want to go on?
- Yeah!
- Okay.
- I'm going first!
I don't know,
I think it was out...
The success that we're seeing is quite amazing.
These boats that have been able to come in here
for many, many years and do whatever they like,
and now there's a defense
and this means that the pressure for illegal fishers is huge.
Okay, Paul, it's recording.
Recently, we've seen that the illegal fishers themselves
are exceedingly violent.
The success that we've had is resulting
for sure in a backlash.
They really need to get rid of us
because what we're doing is successful.
Okay, there's about seven or eight boats from Prek Tanin,
chasing us here.
You see them all. You hear the noises this is all
the boats chasing behind, throwing rocks.
- Hold on!
We're just 2 boats up against fucking 10.
They're fucking everywhere.
We're being attacked.
I've always thought that when things are wrong
and nobody does anything about them,
they just continue to be wrong.
You have to stand up at that point and say,
"Right, no, I'm not taking this."
Alright.
What I'm gonna do now is I'm at the pier
and I'm going to go and drive across
to show just how easy it is to find
where the electric trawlers are.
And the fact that they've come into our area now
three nights running almost all night.
Plus we've got dead dolphins again.
I'm going to show you how easy it is to find them.
So right now I'm going to turn the camera around.
You don't have to be awake all night chasing boats,
spending lots of fuel and time.
What we can do, or what anybody can do,
is just wait for them where they are.
Yeah? - Yeah.
- Four years and they still operate.
They get caught,
the gear gets taken off,
somehow a lot of that gear actually gets returned to them
and that thing really, really frustrates me.
I do not understand how they can be caught,
the gear is confiscated,
and then the same boats are out with the same gear.
We've even marked some of that gear
and then found that same gear back on those boats.
Oh I see them.
- Yeah. - Pretty close.
- Can we see all those boats? - Yeah. Yeah.
- So we're just going to go past,
so it's been around five minutes
and already we're at the place where they could be inspected,
they could be inspected every single day.
None of these folks have registered.
They're here everyday and night.
- Everyday and night.
The problem is
the block system is going to take a few months to get in
and these guys are now going full on full out
because they know it's going to happen.
We need some help.
We need assistance to stop these boats
whilst we're installing the blocks
before there's nothing left to protect.
The status quo on the coast has existed for a long time.
A boat there.
And Paul is seen as a troublemaker, the foreigner
who's come in and rocked the boat
and so there's people who want him shut down.
- Okay, okay bye.
We've been stopped from going out on patrol.
The local government is trying to avoid international incidents
that cause a problem between Cambodia
and its neighboring countries.
But I think it's being used as an excuse to stop us going out
or have us closed down.
Yeah.
- Sad.
- Yeah.
It's sad.
It's all good.
Come on, Rachana.
Hey, do not break.
- No matter what he's done for the ocean,
they still think that he's a foreigner
and that's really sad.
Like you cannot just say you're the white person,
you don't love my ocean more than I do,
you don't love my country more than I do,
which is completely wrong.
- The frustration and hurt and
how it makes you feel inside is intense.
Watching something you love die
and using every single power that you have
to stop yourself doing the one thing that's right,
which is to go out and stop.
If MCC was removed from Koh Seh,
the fishermen would be lining up to get in there.
Everything that they've worked for,
would be gone in a matter of days.
- Sometimes I think like, are you stupid?
Like are you fucking stupid?
Why do you carry on?
Why are we doing this?
Is your family not more important to you than the ocean?
But last night was bad, there's two big pairs.
I mean like big,
you could see the silhouette bigger than our big boat,
just came straight through here.
That's the thing that I'm trying to get them to understand
at the moment is that, like,
the blocks are the only way to do it.
Even if you've run the patrols,
and even if you catch them an hour into what they're doing,
they've done that damage.
You've got to prevent the damage that they're doing,
it's not just about catching them,
it's about stopping them in the first place.
- It's very clear that
the government has to be convinced
that this is the right thing to do.
This is a story that I wrote for Mongabay.
The most recent story that I've published.
The story itself is about Paul's MFMA
and it's kind of looking forward to,
what could happen if they get this plan underway.
It's Paul and Sar Sorin.
With a bunch of, electric gear
that they've confiscated off boats.
Here's a nice image of a trawler
that I got off the coast of Kampot.
Journalists can make things change.
If we're not exposing some of these things then,
the governments have no reason to do anything about them.
Here we have a trawler illegally fishing right outside our area
within our 300 meters.
You need to sink about five or six of these boats,
put them around, and we got beautiful artificial reef.
We have a second boat in the background there.
We're just waiting on police officers to come
and assist us because we've been told we're not allowed to go
and tackle these big old boats on our own.
There you go.
Feeling fucking frustrated.
Two sets of pair trawlers already doing damage and
absolutely no action.
So here we are again on another night.
Sometimes I really wonder,
like, what is going through their heads.
There's been many times it's been rocky,
but we wouldn't still be here
if the government of Cambodia didn't support what we do.
I don't see an end to it unless they stopped me doing it.
One pair, two pair, one missing.
I want to know where this one's gone.
That's the one I'm looking for.
Can you see it?
You can't see that?
Yeah, he's passing it.
You see over there, Puppet?
- Oh okay let's go.
- Take us towards them.
Is there any way we can get some support from Neak?
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, I know, we should be careful.
He's dropped his net.
He's cut his net.
His net is in the water.
That big motherfucker is running.
Hey move, move, move, move.
Move, now.
- You got one of them there Paul.
- Yeah, yeah I see him.
Hey, Virak, now we've got two.
We're 300 meters from Koh Seh.
One has dropped his net and he's running
and there's one other boat with him.
And he's signaling for his friends.
He's calling his friends, he's signaling to the other boats.
Let's go after the other one.
Carney,
give me the baseball bat just in case.
See the electric cable?
Phon, put me into the front.
Okay?
- Ooh.
You guys, man.
- That is a squid.
Yeah.
You know like the big squid that you see on the market?
That's a baby one.
So he's never going to get to be a big squid.
A whole load of them, tiny little babies.
Never going to get any bigger.
I've had enough of these dudes, man.
He's been told that many times
he's still got electric, they still don't stop.
Phon, do the same, yeah? Tow him.
Even I feel sorry for these guys right now.
But at the same time you've got these legal fishermen out there
and the legal fishermen have nothing
and they're losing their livelihoods to these guys.
- We caught them on time and they pulled the neck and said
they go out but they obviously...
- Yeah.
MCC's been on the front lines of this battle for years now,
largely on their own.
But, finally the government is starting to realize
that they're doing this for the right reason
and that it's the right thing to do.
- This is the same way they did for Kampot in 2008, I think.
- He posted 1 out of 10 drop the drop.
- Yeah.
If we can make, like document,
like a request,
then I can show for the donor for the money.
Now we have full backing and permission
from high ranking people within the government of Cambodia
to go out and stop boats again.
- At the moment we have marine police, provincial police,
fisheries.
They've come down to take these people to the court.
To have the Marine police and the provincial police here means
that they're really, really starting to take it seriously.
I'm impressed. I'll be honest, I'm seriously impressed.
- Yeah. - Okay.
- It is a big step because when you arrest someone,
it begins a process that's supposed to be followed.
Right? And we've seen in the past that
they don't follow the process, but, every time you see
the fisheries guys doing their job,
it's a great sign for things to come.
Okay.
The whole MCC project
was built from scratch by Paul and his people
with their bare hands and with very little money.
The problem of overfishing in Cambodia is so complex
and involves so many moving parts that
if it can be solved here,
it can probably be solved anywhere around the world.
Just on the small scale that we've been doing,
we have a proof that the ocean can recover.
The MFMA is enough to give you hope.
It will be a signal to the illegal fishers,
the government is serious about changing things.
- Okay, everybody here this morning,
I'd like to introduce you to, Angie San
is the excellency director general of
Fisheries Administration.
Director Angel San's come today to
officially drop the first demarcation blocks
so that we can begin to protect the area with
anti-trawling devices that create fish homes.
- The idea is each block is around 150
and then we have a big metal pole
block to join them together.
- Right.
- So this is the actual fish aggregation device.
So it's attracting the fish into it.
So the moment we put these to the test,
within one to two days,
they're full of fish.
Like, everything is just looking for a home.
For him to come here, for him to say that
the work we're doing is wonderful
and it's something that could be implemented in other places
in Cambodia,
for him to be so happy with the work that we've done,
tt's insanely wonderful.
All very good swimmers.
Swim from the deep.
Yeah, onto the front is probably the easiest.
And just around here is where Rachana made her reef.
So she's got the two big structure,
a small one, and then two lions like on the pier.
It looks very beautiful.
Rachana is basically the future and the hope of MCC in my mind.
Mind your toes, mind your feet.
Go on, out of the way. Come on Rachana,
I believe under her leadership
she will take MCC to a different level.
- 1,2,3!
- That allows us to do what we've done here
throughout the whole archipelago.
It's the beginning of full restoration.
It's the beginning of the beginning.
I'm just, I'm buzzing. It's brilliant.
- Yeah, yeah.
Thank you very, very much everybody
for being fucking wonderful!
Yes!
- For me, the great power of investigative journalism
is that it can make things change.
And, this new job gives me a much bigger platform
and more resources to keep reporting
the stories that don't get told.