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Fishing communities on the banks of the Tonle Sap are about to be surveyed to see how they're making out four years into the five-year-long Tonle Sap Initiative (TSI), primarily a project of the Asian Development Bank, AsDB, that was supposed to improve their lives.

It appears it's not going well:

The poor living along the banks of the Tonle Sap are part of the nearly 40 percent of Cambodia's 13.8 million population living below the poverty line.

These were the communities that the bank hoped to aid as part of the TSI. This initiative aimed to be ‘'a partnership of organisations and people working to meet the poverty and environment challenges of the Tonle Sap,'' states the AsDB on its website.

In July 2003, the bank added the ‘Tonle Sap Basin Strategy' to the TSI as part of its broader Cambodia country programme to meet a 2007 deadline. This was deemed ‘'consistent with AsDB's water policy and worldwide trend towards managing land, water and biotic resources within a framework of basin units,'' adds the bank.

In fact, the second pillar of the TSI was singled out as the ‘Tonle Sap Sustainable Livelihoods Project,' which was estimated to cost 19.7 million US dollars, with 15 million dollars coming from the Asian Development Fund and 4.7 million dollars from the Finnish government. The project aimed to improve the economy of the fishing communities by assuring the locals a role in choosing, planning and managing small programmes for their benefit.

Yet, as the Oxfam report revealed, public participation is ‘'low in proportion to the number of projects of the AsDB's Tonle Sap Basin portfolio.'' Further, it is also ‘'difficult to trace whether and how the recommendations from community members were or were not incorporated into the final project design.''

And for AsDB watchdogs like FACT, nothing conveys the bank's distance from its intended beneficiaries more than the departure from its original promise of creating new fishing communities in addition to strengthening existing ones. ‘'The project sought to improve the fishing communities by establishing 500 more around the Tonle Sap,'' says Pen. ‘'But until now we have not seen a new fishing community that was promised.''

For a closer look at the lives impacted by changes on the Tonle Sap, here's an article detailing just how tough things are.

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