The Cambodian government has signed off on the construction of a new cement factory deep inside Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, with the factory expected to source limestone for cement production from a mining operation less than 1 kilometre, just over half a mile, from the newly approved site.
This comes despite a November 2023 moratorium on the issuance of new mining licenses in Prey Lang and a halt to the expansion of existing mining businesses operating in the ostensibly protected forest.
The 99-hectare (245-acre) plot of land in Kratie province that’s been earmarked for the cement factory was awarded in January to KP Cement, a politically connected company already operating mining pits in Prey Lang. Mongabay’s previous investigation into KP Cement uncovered rampant deforestation at the company’s mine where limestone and marble are being unearthed, irrevocably altering the ecosystem of Prey Lang.
The roughly 490,000-hectare (1.2-million-acre) Prey Lang has seen mining operations spring up and expand within each of the four provinces that the wildlife sanctuary straddles in central Cambodia. It’s one of the largest low-lying rainforests in mainland Southeast Asia, but its flat terrain and abundance of resources has seen illegal loggers, industrial-scale miners and wildlife traffickers flock to the forest, picking Prey Lang clean above and below the ground.
Over the course of 2023, a mining boom gripped the wildlife sanctuary and saw infamous timber trader Try Pheap pick up some 28,000 hectares (69,200 acres) in new iron ore mining concessions, most of which fall within Prey Lang.
On top of this, Chinese-owned Late Cheng Mining Development expanded its gold mine aggressively in a stretch of Prey Lang that sits within Kampong Thom province, while in Stung Treng province, Japan’s Nittetsu Mining is exploring Prey Lang for copper.
Prey Lang supports a wide array of threatened wildlife, as well as an estimated 250,000 Indigenous people belonging to the Kuy ethnicity, and its watershed also helps to regulate the flows of water through the Mekong River and Tonle Sap Lake. This delicate ecosystem has been consistently strained by overexploitation. Global Forest Watch data show deforestation across Prey Lang has been increasing since 2018.
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The Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary has been cut in half by the power line, mining is destroying the land and poisoning waterways and fishing grounds, destructive industrial scale logging has stolen the last commercially valuable trees.
Ida Theilade, professor, University of Copenhagen
But a November 2023 intervention from Keo Rattanak, Cambodia’s minister of mines and energy, offered conservationists hope by promising to ban new mining licenses and prevent the expansion of existing mining operations within Prey Lang.
However, the clearance of protected forest to make way for a new cement factory appears to contradict the spirit of Rattanak’s intervention.
Documents published in the March 2025 edition of Cambodia’s Royal Gazette, which lists new laws and government announcements, show that a 50-year lease on a 99-hectare plot of land inside Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary was awarded to KP Cement on Jan. 13, 2025.
Satellite imagery shows that the plot where the factory is set to be built was cleared of forest between December 2024 and March 2025.
‘Only the rich benefit’
One Kratie province resident, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the powerful figures connected to the mine, reported seeing heavy machinery delivered to the mining site in recent months, along with a flurry of visiting officials from the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and local government. The resident said they believed this was part of the environmental impact assessment process.
“These days, they are using excavators to dig the earth on the contracted land to build houses for workers,” the resident told Mongabay in a phone interview. “They are clearing the forest to build a cement factory on the land.”
The resident, who reported speaking to workers involved in the forest clearance, said the mining companies operating in the area are controlled by Chinese investors.
“For the last three years, [this village] has become the hotspot of stone mining inside [Prey Lang], it’s all allowed by the Ministry of Mines and Energy and protected by the Ministry of Environment,” the resident said. “The local authorities do not dare [to intervene] whereas the local communities are very saddened — only the rich benefit from [this development].”
Marginalised communities across the area lived sustainably in the forest until industrial-scale logging operations saw many villagers hired to fell the very trees that had sustained their families for generations. Residents say they fear the cement factory will use the same tactics.
“It will be low pay, our farmers do not have the labour skills needed for industry, so we will be [easily taken advantage of],” the resident said. “I fear the mining will expand, it concerns us because now more of the forest is inaccessible to us, we can’t make a living, it’s strictly prohibited to enter — mining is for the rich.”
While the marble, limestone and cement sold from Prey Lang is highly valuable, the extraction from open-cast pits has seen deforestation spike, habitats lost, groundwater flows altered, and a blanket of dust sweep the immediate area.
The dust is a particular concern among the communities living nearby. They have good reason to be concerned: limestone is a carcinogen, and prolonged exposure to the dust from limestone mines can cause cancer, along with irreversible damage to eyes, lungs and skin.
This dust isn’t just confined to the mining site. As the limestone is transported out of Prey Lang, over the Mekong River and often toward the capital, Phnom Penh, open-top trucks billow dust from the crushed rocks, coating the homes alongside the roads in a mix of limestone and dust from the dirt road.
“The residents have complained about their health, because of the dust,” the Kratie resident told Mongabay. “These mining operations really affect the local communities living around the area.”
An official from the Ministry of Mines and Energy and two from the Ministry of Environment read but did not respond to questions sent by Mongabay via the messaging app Telegram.
In bad company
The environmental consequences of limestone mining are well understood, even if they’re frequently overlooked due to the need for concrete in the construction industry, one of Cambodia’s key economic drivers that has stalled and shed billions in value following the Covid-19 pandemic.
As Cambodia’s economy has struggled to regain its footing post-pandemic, extractive industries have boomed, with large-scale logging operations proliferating among the tycoon class that seeks financial stability in what can be sold from the land.
The Ministry of Environment has long remained a weak enforcer of what, on paper, are strong regulations. While environmental impact assessments for industrial-scale mining are required by law, sharing the findings is not. The ministry considers such assessments confidential, while the consulting firms that produce the studies have faced scrutiny. Even the new regulatory code has done little to curb the excesses of the country’s elite.
Mongabay spoke with two staff members at W2P Environment, the consulting firm that’s producing an environmental impact assessment for KP Cement’s new factory in Prey Lang. The firm presented a complete draft of the assessment on Jan. 10, but when pressed for details, neither W2P’s director, Chrea Lekenha, nor staffer Ham Kimkong would discuss the findings, the methodology, or what environmental issues were studied.
Kimkong even went so far as to say that the KP Cement factory’s impact assessment had not yet been conducted, but has since stopped responding after reporters presented evidence posted online suggesting that the study had in fact been completed.
Neither KP Cement nor its parent company, Chhay Chingheang Group, replied to emailed questions sent by Mongabay regarding the environmental impact of the new cement factory or how it circumvented the ban on expanding mining operations in Prey Lang.
Chhay Chingheang, the eponymous chairman of the conglomerate, has a portfolio that extends across mining, construction, real estate and financial services, as well as business ties to the ruling Hun family. Ministry of Commerce records list the directors of HKLCH Import Export as Chingheang and Hun Kimleng, the socialite niece to former prime minister Hun Sen and cousin to current Prime Minister Hun Manet.
Besides familial ties to the two most powerful men in Cambodia, Kimleng is married to Neth Savoeun, the former national police chief and now one of Cambodia’s 11 deputy prime ministers.
But it’s not just Chingheang who has taken to mining the rainforest of Prey Lang. Since KP Cement’s operations began in 2022, three other mining companies were awarded adjoining concessions totalling a further estimated 770 hectares (1,900 acres).
The largest of the additional concessions in Kratie province belongs to Vantage Mining, which appears to have been awarded roughly 533 hectares (1,317 acres) along the border of KP Cement’s concession in Prey Lang. While official documentation announcing the award by the Ministry of Mines and Energy doesn’t appear to be publicly available, the company has marked its marble quarry on Google Maps, accompanied by photos widely shared on social media by a Vantage Mining employee.
Vantage Mining was incorporated in February 2021 and lists Chinese national Chen Al Len, as its sole director. Chen’s other ventures, which he directs alongside Hun To, the playboy nephew of Hun Sen, include the notorious KB Hotel and Heng He Casino. Both the hotel and casino were sanctioned on Dec. 8, 2023, by the governments of the UK and Canada for their alleged involvement in human trafficking and online fraud.
One of the other new mining companies is HSC Heavy Equipment, whose director is Sok Hong, the son of Sokimex business empire founder Sok Kong. The Sok family also owns a hotel that has previously been identified as a site where victims of trafficking are held and forced to run online scams.
Is conservation the goal in Prey Lang?
None of the companies currently mining the Kratie province section of Prey Lang responded to Mongabay’s requests for comment. But the continued industrialisation of the rainforest poses a clear and imminent threat to the hundreds of species of rare fauna and flora.
To protect Prey Lang’s habitats of pileated gibbons (Hylobates pileatus), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and Sunda pangolins (Manis javanica), all of which are endangered or critically endangered, Conservation International launched a REDD+ project with Japanese trading house Mitsui.
The project began in the Stung Treng province section of the protected area, with a view to expanding the project across the whole of Prey Lang. But it’s unclear how the expansion of mining operations, which was supposedly banned, will affect the project.
Oum Sony, country director for Conservation International’s Cambodian office, did not respond to a request for comment from Mongabay.
The construction of a cement factory inside Prey Lang would likely mean a significant level of supporting infrastructure would be needed, according to one industry expert who requested anonymity due to the politically connected nature of the companies involved.
“Cement processing requires significant fuel sources to generate the heat needed to process limestone into clinker. This is normally generated from burning coal, sometimes supplemented by co-firing with garbage and things like old car tires,” the expert said. “All this fuel will need to be transported by road to this rural location.”
Cambodia’s lack of domestic coal supply means that if coal were needed to fuel the new cement factory, it would likely have to be imported into the coastal port in Sihanoukville, driven roughly 440 kilometers (273 miles) to Kratie province on the other side of the country and then across the Mekong River, into the jungle.
The industry expert noted that the high temperatures needed at coal-fired cement factories would ensure the emissions contained no harmful dioxins, the new factory would contribute significantly to Cambodia carbon dioxide emissions, even as the country strives for carbon neutrality by 2050.
Cement factories are among the top sources of Cambodia’s CO2 emissions, with four of the most polluting cement factories producing more CO2 than flights in and out of Phnom Penh International Airport, according to data collected by Climate TRACE. In 2024 alone, five Cambodian cement factories are estimated to have produced 4.81 million tons of CO2 – equivalent to carbon sequestered by 1.7 million hectares (4.3 million acres) of forest.
But the sheer volume of stress placed upon the protected forest’s ecosystem suggests that conservation may not be the government’s end goal, according to Ida Theilade, a professor at the University of Copenhagen who has studied the Prey Lang ecosystem extensively.
“The Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary has been cut in half by the power line, mining is destroying the land and poisoning waterways and fishing grounds, destructive industrial scale logging has stolen the last commercially valuable trees, and the Ministry of Environment at best remains quiet if not in direct collusion with perpetrators,” Theilade said in an email.
“It becomes more and more evident that the intention of the Cambodian government and its cronies is to raze Prey Lang to the ground by handing the land to those who will help keep the regime in power.”
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
