About the Bunong
The Bunong people are a marginalized ethnic minority who live in the Northeast of Cambodia. They are confronted with the loss of their fields, grazing areas and forest resources due to the rapid expansion of rubber plantations and intrusion of settlers. Moreover, sacred places and graveyards that represent the origins of their communities have been destroyed. The loss of land has both a strong impact on Bunong livelihoods and on their social relations, religious beliefs and cultural and political identities.
This happens right now
A family brings home the remains of their field hut, when the plantation forced them to leave. Whereas before, the Bunong felt free to go wherever they pleased to make a new field, to gather forest resources and to fish, they are now constrained by the plantations. Before, they could show their children and grandchildren sacred places. Now, they are worried that the new generation will slowly forget the destroyed places and Bunong identity will fade away.
In the last decades
Within a very short time period, the Bunong people had to radically change their former livelihoods and cope with multiple challenges affecting their very way of being in the world. Until the arrival of the plantations’ bulldozers in 2008, which started to destroy Bunong forests and fields, people depended on forest-based livelihoods. They cultivated dry rice, maize and vegetables on swidden fields by ways of a sustainable rotational agriculture practiced for hundreds of years. They gathered forest products like wild vegetables, fruits, honey, rattan for their subsistence and resin too, which could be sold at a very high price. Fish were caught daily and hunting was important.
When the rubber plantations expanded on their customary land, the challenge for the Bunong was tremendous. They were forced to switch from rotational agriculture to permanent agriculture on the little remaining land within only a couple of years and without any meaningful support. Agriculture was their only viable option. Moving to a city was impossible: there was simply no use for unskilled Bunong labor barely speaking Khmer. Wage labor on the rubber plantations provided no way forward for the Bunong either who were used to the freedom and joys as independent swiddeners, very often sharing the workload in good company with their family, kin and fellow villagers. Not only was wage labor on the plantations experienced as lonely, tedious and servile but also, the families could not sustain their standard of living with the meager salaries.
At the same time, the Bunong were forced to take up the struggle for the recognition of their indigenous territories and as an indigenous people to legally protect the remaining land and forest and contest what has been signed away by the State to the plantations. They had to defend their land and forest both, on the ground and on paper, to ensure a Bunong future while they were already struggling with securing their immediate livelihoods. It was not the first time the Bunong people experienced massive changes and hardship. In 1971/72, the life of Bunong villagers had changed drastically with the arrival of the Khmer Rouge guerillas. The great majority was displaced by the Khmer Rouge and forced to live in camps in another district. A minority of the people – those living close to the Vietnamese border – could escape to war-torn Vietnam, where they ended up in refugee camps and strategic hamlets established by the Americans for ‘hill tribe’ people fighting the communist forces. The Bunong could only return in the 1980s to their territory and had to rebuild their lives and livelihoods from scratch.
After 2008, people would often compare the loss of their land to the time of war, when they had to abandon their fields and leave their homes. But this time, they knew, return was impossible. People were desperate. Incidences of alcoholism, depression, suicide, conflicts and violence rose dramatically. But people also supported each other, gave each other a helping hand and enjoyed conviviality when cultivating remaining fields, they carried on the countless ceremonies for the spirits and ancestors and also Catholic Bunong joined in, time and again, Bunong villagers stood united and firm when protecting sacred forests from being cut or protesting against the desecration of cemetries situated in the forest which now a rubber company considered to be their concession area, people joined the countless village meetings where they discussed ways to cope with the many challenges and deal with loggers, company managers, State bureaucracy, NGOs and conflicts within and between Bunong communities.
Grassroots organizations
Fortunately, there have been people from within the villages and from abroad who trust in Bunong people that they are capable to find their own solutions to such fundamental problems and tremendous challenges and hardships. This is the reason why grassroots organizations, like BIPA, play such an important role. They come from within the community, they know the community and understand what is important. Grassroots organizations can better understand what their community needs right now and in the long run.