The floating casino moored at the edge of this city, where the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers meet, symbolizes the readiness of those who wield power and influence in Cambodia to gamble with its fragile environment and economic future, development specialists say.
More than ever before, the Tonle Sap river, which links Cambodia's great central lake to the Mekong, is stained with silt, the result of rampant overcutting of forests that causes rapid rainwater run-off and soil erosion.
Fishermen, whose small wooden craft bob on the water around the casino, complain of a decline in catches caused by excessive fishing in the lake and extensive logging of forests that surround it.
Those forests are flooded each year in the rainy season from June to October, when the Tonle Sap lake expands to about 16,000 square kilometers (6,177 square miles), more than six times its dry-season size. They are the main breeding grounds for the lake's once-abundant fish. Now, many of the breeding grounds are destroyed, endangering the future of one of the world's most productive freshwater fisheries, scientists say.
According to these experts, foreign-aid officials and Cambodian critics of the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, Cambodia faces an environmental crisis that could prove as dangerous as the recently ended threat from the Khmer Rouge, whose tyrannical regime caused death and destruction on a huge scale.
These sources say that years of fighting, and struggles for political power in Phnom Penh and the provinces, have created a climate of lawlessness in which those who control the guns — chiefly senior officials, military officers and business leaders — have gained a hold on two of the country's most valuable natural resources: its forests and fisheries.
Both are being depleted at dangerous rates, according to technical studies carried out or sponsored by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
The most recent report on Cambodia's economic performance and prospects, prepared by the Asian Development Bank for a meeting of international aid donors to Cambodia in Japan next month, warns that "uncontrolled logging, much of it illegal, threatens Cambodia's forests" and that if it continued at current rates, "logging could deforest the country in five years."
The bank said that more than 4 million cubic meters (141 million cubic feet) of commercial timber were cut annually, compared with an estimated sustainable yield of no more than 1.5 million cubic meters, and that a further 6 million cubic meters of logs are felled each year for domestic consumption.
The commercially valuable species are mainly smuggled across Cambodia's long and porous borders to, or through, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, despite an official ban on exports of logs and on processed timber that does not come from legal concessions.
Many of the fish, including eels, prawns and catfish, harvested from the Tonle Sap lake by trawlers of wealthy concession holders are exported to other Southeast Asian countries. The lake has an annual yield of nearly 200,000 tons, valued at about $70 million.
"Basically, we are raping our own country with support from outside," said Kao Kim Hourn, executive director of the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace.
In a separate report prepared recently for the board of the Asian Development Bank, marine scientists found that, as a result of logging and other human encroachment, less than 39 percent of the original 10,000 square kilometers of flooded forest that formed the main fish-breeding grounds of the Tonle Sap lake remained under natural vegetation.
They said fishing in the lake had "increased dramatically" in recent years as the government's fisheries department had expanded the auctioning of fishing concessions. About 3 million Cambodians live on or around the lake.
"The concessions usually are acquired by wealthy outsiders, thus taking fishing grounds away from riparian communities," the report said. "The fisheries clearly show signs of overexploitation, including the disappearance of large commercial species from the catch, their replacement with smaller and less valuable species, and a marked decline in the average size of the fish caught."
Some scientists worry that if rampant logging continues, the Tonle Sap lake may silt up entirely.
In 1997, forest covered 10.6 million hectares (26 million acres), 58 percent of Cambodia, down from 13.2 million hectares, or 73 percent, in 1969.
The World Bank estimates that 4.3 million cubic meters of timber with a potential export value of $350 million were logged in 1997 alone, far in excess of the sustainable yield.
But the government in Phnom Penh collected taxes of only $12.4 million on that haul.
The paucity of this tax collection, which critics say is a symptom of a deeply corrupted regime, riles foreign governments, nongovernment aid organizations and international financial institutions, which have poured several billion dollars in aid into Cambodia in recent years.
They will insist at the donors' meeting in Japan next month that the Cambodian government show a credible commitment to reform, especially in forest management, in exchange for new aid, officials said.
The World Bank, in its report in May, said that nearly 70 percent of Cambodia had officially been allocated for forest concessions, but its forest law was unenforceable.
"Since 1993, the military, especially army commanders, have come to regard these forest resources as their own parish," said Paul Matthews, resident coordinator for the United Nations in Cambodia. "They see them as a supplemental source of finance. It's sheer greed, short-sightedness and indifference to the consequences for the country and the vast majority of the population."
Apart from depleting central government coffers and causing major environmental damage, the illegal logging is fueling corruption, lawlessness and human-rights abuses, aid officials and government critics say.
Many timber companies in Cambodia operate as "a virtual mafia," said Patrick Alley, co-director of Global Witness, a nongovernment organization based in London that has published eight detailed reports on Cambodia's timber trade since 1995.
"They operate illegally in other companies' concessions, paying the military to intimidate the relevant authorities and the companies themselves," he said. "In addition, they use force to threaten other companies' workers, which has resulted in numerous killings."
Cambodia's parliamentary opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, said the deforestation had "enriched a dangerous class of timber warlords" linked to the government of Mr. Hun Sen and the military.
"Illegal and anarchic logging associated with rampant corruption must be stopped," he said. "More damage will further alter the climate, cause erosion that fills irrigation channels and fishing grounds with silt, and leave Cambodian farmland ever more vulnerable to both drought and flooding."
Some Cambodian officials put part of the blame for abuses in the forest industry on political rivalries between the two parties in the former coalition government that broke apart in July 1997, after Mr. Hun Sen used force to oust supporters of his co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh.
Since Mr. Hun Sen and the prince reached agreement in November on terms for a new coalition in which Mr. Hun Sen is the sole prime minister and dominant figure, there is a better chance of bringing order back to Cambodia's forests, these officials argue.
"If this government, and the Cambodian People's Party which Mr. Hun Sen leads, want to win the next election, they know that they must stop illegal logging," said Khieu Kanharith, Cambodia's secretary of state for information and a senior party member. "The people don't like it. For every log that is cut down, we lose a vote."
