Siem Reap still one of Cambodia's poorest parts as package trips and foreign-owned businesses swallow visitors' cash
Ben Doherty in Siem Reap
guardian.co.uk
Monday 27 September 2010
Children in Siem Reap hunt for butterflies to sell. More than half of all families in the province live below the poverty line, on less than 80p a day. Photograph: Ben Doherty for the Guardian
Boa is 19, the sixth of 11 children. With all of his family, he lives in a small thatched two-room house on the outskirts of Siem Reap.
Three mornings a week, he and his siblings, along with a gaggle of children from his ramshackle suburb, walk the two kilometres to the neighbouring forest carrying makeshift nets fashioned from long branches, wire and plastic bags. They go to catch butterflies.
"We have to catch butterflies to sell because we are a poor family. We have no money. The money we make is to help the family, for food and to go to school. Without this, we cannot go to school," Boa said through an interpreter.
The butterflies they catch – usually between 60 and 100 between them – they bring to the Butterflies Garden Restaurant in Siem Reap town. They are released inside the restaurant's massive net, to flutter around the diners sitting in the garden café. For their toil, the children are paid about 5,000 riel (80p) each.
"But still, we don't all go to school," Boa says. "Some have to stay home to help the family. But everyone has to help catch butterflies."Despite the annual flood of international tourists to the Angkor temples and the estimated £380m they are predicted to bring this year, Siem Reap remains one of the poorest parts of Cambodia.
More than half of all families live below the poverty line, surviving on less than 80p a day. Four villages in 10 have no access to safe drinking water and 53% of all children are malnourished. Literacy rates are some of the lowest in the country, at 64%, and just 10% of children finish high school. "Siem Reap is one of the poorest provinces of Cambodia, which is a bit weird seeing the number of tourists going there," said Philippe Delanghe, the head of the UN's culture unit in Cambodia. "I only hope that in the future we might be able to help people living around Angkor Wat to improve their livelihoods, which hasn't really been the case until now."
The majority of tourists' money is spent with foreign-owned hotels, tour companies and restaurants. Many package tourists spend a week in Siem Reap without visiting a local business.
Ticket sales from the Angkor temples, worth about £19m a year, are split between government coffers in Phnom Penh (some of which is redirected back to the Angkor management authority) and a petrol company called Sokimex.
The anomaly of such out-of-town wealth surrounded by so much local poverty grows more stark every tourist season.
Suko Om, the manager of the Butterflies Garden Restaurant, says it spends between £250 and £315 a month buying butterflies from about 25 local children.
The business also offers jobs to older children, as well as access to a local school, food and even a place to sleep. But he still feels the restaurant is working at the edges of a larger, systemic problem.
"There is revenue coming into Siem Reap because of the tourists, but most of the businesses are foreign-owned. Almost all of the money just goes straight back out."
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