In North East Cambodia different indigenous groups have lived for centuries, preserving an immense and extremely diverse forest ecosystem, maintained intact until the recent decades, when massive forest exploitation started. Indigenous agricultural practices, as in many other forest-covered areas in the world, have contributed to maintain biodiversity and are among the most sustainable so far known.

The subversion of this ecological and social system is full of consequences for indigenous communities and women, as this Bunong woman from Mondulkiri explains:

“The company has cut all the trees to do the plantation. They say that indigenous people cut the forest too. But indigenous people don’t do that! We ask the spirits before cutting, we try to understand from the dreams if the spirits agree, then we cut just small plots to do our fields, and we never cut the big trees.  The company instead cut all, so now there are no trees, animals and even vegetables. There were six big forests here around, and lots of wild animals; we could find vegetables, medicines, resin, roots, fishes, fruits.