Sitting in their floating home amid a pile of iron frames and netting, Kong Kouen and Hoeung Piseth are busy preparing hundreds of prawn traps that will be placed at the bottom of the Tonle Sap Lake.
It is hard work that will take several days to finish and requires significant financial investment from the couple. Nowadays, there is little guarantee that this long-established fishing technique will yield enough catch to sustain them and their four teenage children.
Overfishing, regional hydropower dam development and global climate change have pushed the lake into ecological crisis, and fishing communities are sinking into despair.
“Before, when I set a hundred of these iron traps, I could get 100 kilograms [of prawn], but now, though I set 1,000 or 2,000, I can’t get any more than 20 kilograms,” Kong Kouen told VOA Khmer. She added that they spent about $1,500 to buy material for around 1,000 traps, which will last three years.
The prawn traps supplement the household income from daily fish catch, but this too, had halved in recent years. On some days, they go out fishing and come back with nothing and cannot even cover the cost of gasoline, fishing equipment and boat maintenance. Kong Kouen said she did not know how much longer they could afford to keep their children in high school.
Like their floating village of Kampong Luong, on the lake’s southern shore, the family and their fishing techniques move with the rising and receding water, and other seasonal changes in the Tonle Sap’s ecosystem and fish populations.
“We are the river people,” said Kong Kouen, using a Khmer term, Niak Tonle, for hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who live off the highly productive Tonle Sap Lake and Mekong River, which is connected to the lake through a tributary. “The lake, to us, is what the rice field is to the farmers,” she told VOA Khmer.
“How can I be secure and can go out and get fish?” she said. “If they can stop [illegal overfishing], my children can rely on this sector, but if not, it’s the end. The next generation [has to be] ready to go away,” she said.