Vietnam’s Fish Industry Dominates in Cambodia [more idiocy from the Kingdoom]

Vietnam’s Fish Industry Dominates in Cambodia

The Cambodia Daily | 7 June 2014

[excerpts]

 

Men unload fish into a metal tank at Chbar Ampov market in Phnom Penh’s Meanchey district last week. (Siv Channa/The Cambodia Daily)

Since he started his business in 2012, Mr. Veasna has been importing Trey Phtok from Vietnam, along with the rest of the nearly one ton of fish he sells each day.

“In Cambodia we don’t have fish,” he said earlier this week. “If Cambodian fish were available I wouldn’t need to buy and sell Vietnamese fish.”

But Cambodia does have fish, lots of them.

Cambodia’s inland freshwater fisheries—among the richest in the world thanks to large floodplains around the Tonle Sap lake and the country’s major rivers—are the most intensively exploited on earth, according to the WorldFish Center, a Malaysia-based research non-profit.

Cambodia ranks fourth in the world behind China, India and Bangladesh in the productivity of its fresh water capture fisheries, according to the organization.

“We have an abundance of wild fish [in Cambodia]. It’s amazing how many wild fish there is here in terms of volume,” said Alan Brooks, WorldFish’s Greater Mekong Region director.

According to inland fishery statistics, he estimated that about 500,000 tons of fish are naturally produced per year.

However, much of the wild fish caught here is smuggled out of the country, meaning the robust trade in freshwater fish is not reflected in official government trade figures, said Youk Senglong, program manager at the Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT).

Read the full article in The Cambodia Daily...