- The Cambodian government is set to begin construction of the Funan Techo Canal, a nearly $1.2 billion, 180-kilometer (112-mile) waterway navigation project that will cut across four provinces to connect the Mekong River to the sea.
- The primary rationale for building the canal is to reduce Cambodia’s shipping costs, as well as to generate jobs and economic development.
- Mongabay has followed this mega-project’s development for more than a year, speaking with more than 50 people living along the canal’s proposed route. Virtually everyone we spoke with noted that the government has provided very little information about the project, and amid the uncertainty, fear has taken root.
- In inland communities in the rich floodplains of the Mekong River, farmers we spoke with said they worried they’d lose their homes or land, and that construction would disrupt the annual months-long inundation of the wetlands they rely on for planting rice as well as for fishing, crabbing and raising livestock.
This is the second of two stories about the potential impact of Cambodia’s planned Funan Techo Canal. Read part one, about consequences for coastal communities and wildlife, here.
TAKEO, Cambodia — Thet Chanton finally finished construction on his new home along the banks of the Prek Bassac (Bassac creek) in Prey Sambor village, a small farming community in Cambodia’s southern province of Takeo. That was in June 2024. Just five months later, when Mongabay first interviewed Chanton in November 2024, he said local authorities had already told him his house would need to be demolished.
“We had a meeting with the village chief, but there were commune, district and provincial authorities there too,” Chanton said. “They told us that Prek Bassac will be studied to become part of the Funan Techo Canal.”
The canal is a controversial new waterway the Cambodian government is planning to link the Mekong River to the Gulf of Thailand. It will cut a 180-kilometer (112-mile) trench through farms, wetlands and homes in Kandal, Takeo, Kampot and Kep provinces as it goes. Chanton’s household is one of 400 the government estimates will lose their houses to the mega-project’s construction. The same estimates suggest that, in total, 2,305 households consisting of 11,525 people will be directly impacted in some way by the Funan Techo Canal.
“We spent about $20,000 to build this house, but we did that with a $10,000 microfinance loan,” said Chanton, who owned a small rice farm around his newly built home when Mongabay met him in Takeo. He said he’d heard the government planned to widen the Prek Bassac to a total of 300 meters (984 feet) and construct concrete roads on either side of the canal. “It’ll affect everything I own. My house, my rice fields — if they build it, they take everything from me.”
He said another 100 people would likely be affected to various degrees within Prey Sambor.
This new waterway will serve as a logistics and transport hub, reducing the cost of shipping by enabling direct shipments from ports along the coast to Phnom Penh, the nation’s inland capital, and reducing reliance on Vietnam, through which roughly one-third of Cambodia’s imports and exports currently pass. Local media reported that the government hopes the Funan Techo Canal will support 90% of Cambodia’s imports and exports, if it’s completed. The estimate for the canal’s cost was originally $1.8 billion, but has since declined to almost $1.2 billion, with China investing 49% and Cambodia putting in the remaining 51%. It’s estimated to create anywhere between 50,000 and 1.6 million jobs by 2050.
Yet the canal has been plagued with false starts since the groundbreaking ceremony on Aug. 5, 2024. Most recently, news stories suggesting that dredging would begin in December 2025 circulated, but on the ground, there’ve been few reports of progress beyond scattered posts apparently marking the project area seen by nearby residents.
In February 2026, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Economy and Finance was quoted in pro-government media as saying the construction company involved in the Funan Techo Canal had declined to begin work until all issues with affected communities had been resolved. According to the same report, the canal “may be completed in 2028.”
The government’s balloons, powder cannons and flag-waving celebrations of the August 2024 groundbreaking ceremony have been replaced by stony silence and a widespread paranoia along the canal’s route. The government has continued to keep residents largely in the dark, with those who expect to be affected unsure whether to plant new crops or look for a new place to live. Many wake up wondering whether they’ll see excavators outside their homes on any given morning.
“We’re worried; we only just moved into this house and now it looks like we’ll lose it,” Chanton told Mongabay in November 2024. “The government should have been clear with people, we need to know where the canal will be built, where we will go after it’s done, how we will be compensated and so on. Instead, more than 100 households in this area have to live with these worries every day.”
Mongabay visited communities along the route of the Funan Techo Canal in November 2024, and again in April 2025 and October 2025, but has been unable to contact Chanton since that first visit. Through interviewing more than 50 residents in Kandal, Takeo, Kampot and Kep, Mongabay documented the prolonged fear consuming communities along the canal’s route. Even local authorities said they have received no information as the threat of eviction looms and the question of compensation remains unanswered.
Between October 2024 and February 2026, Mongabay repeatedly attempted to call, message and email various government officials and even delivered written questions directly to the office of Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chanthol, who spearheads the Funan Techo Canal. To date, none have responded.
Mongabay’s first report on the impacts of the Funan Techo Canal focused on the potential consequences for coastal conservation and the communities whose fisheries in Kep province may become inaccessible when the canal begins operation. The situation inland for farmers and conservationists looks equally bleak.
Chea Huot, another resident of Takeo province, told Mongabay in November 2024 that local authorities had warned people against protesting but hadn’t been able to provide any information. Based on publicly available maps of the canal’s route, Huot’s house initially appeared it would be affected by the opaque infrastructure project, although he’d been given little insight as to how badly when Mongabay first spoke with him.
“We don’t even know how many people will be affected, so everyone is nervous now — we have nowhere else to settle if we’re evicted from here,” he said. “I don’t know much about the Funan Techo Canal; maybe the government hopes to gain some economic benefits, but the people are losing land and now live in fear of that, so we’re all waiting to see what happens. It could make us all poorer if there’s no good compensation packages.”
By April 2025, Huot told Mongabay that the situation remained unchanged: Nobody in the area, not even local authorities, had been given any information on relocation or compensation, he said.
In January 2026, though, Huot’s situation changed dramatically. After years of living in fear of eviction, Huot told Mongabay his house is no longer set to be affected by the Funan Techo Canal. Local authorities told him the canal’s route had been adjusted slightly.
“I still don’t see any construction yet and I asked [others] who will be affected about compensation, but they didn’t know anything new either,” he said in a phone interview. “We’re happy that the project has moved to a new location; it appears to have affected fewer houses but a large amount of farmland.”
The Takeo Provincial Administration told Mongabay it had no information about the revised route of the canal or compensation packages for affected residents.
In a round of recent follow-up phone interviews, several members of communities in the canal’s path reported to Mongabay that alterations had been made to the canal’s route. The project does not appear to have fundamentally changed, but rather to have been partially rerouted, possibly to avoid certain buildings. Residents of Kep province, where the canal is set to meet the sea, told Mongabay they hadn’t heard of any planned changes to the canal’s route. What remains consistent is the government’s silence and the absence of information among communities.
Floods for some, droughts for others
Even farmers who might not have to relocate anticipate adverse effects on their croplands once the canal is built, according to farmers across Kandal, Takeo and Kampot provinces, almost all of whom depend wholly on agriculture for their livelihoods.
In Kok Nuer village, Takeo province, Keo Sarath has served as an elected village chief since 2019. But even this role has failed to secure him answers from the officials in charge of the Funan Techo Canal project.
“I’ve not been given any clear information, even though I’ve asked for it, so we don’t know exactly where they’ll build the Funan Techo Canal, when they’ll start construction and excavation or how those displaced will be compensated,” he told Mongabay in November 2024. “All I do know is that 62 households will be affected by the canal, but that’s just houses; there are many more plots owned by people who live elsewhere and farm here.”
Sarath described the village and its surrounding areas as good croplands, where farmers can grow rice and a wide range of vegetables, and live comfortably as a result.
In Kok Nuer village, the canal construction may cause drought, which would affect far more farming households than the 62 that may be forced to relocate.
“From what I’ve seen of the Funan Techo Canal, it’s only created problems for people,” Sarath said. “It’s a lot of time, money and energy to start a new life in a new place. It feels like a waste of our village.”
Mongabay contacted Sarath again in April 2025, but he said nothing had changed. In January 2026, though, Sarath also told Mongabay that the project had been adjusted and his property would be spared, but he noted that the canal’s route shifted east, potentially affecting others in his community instead.
Construction of the canal will slice its way through the Mekong’s floodplains in Kandal, Takeo and Kampot provinces, where few communities are served by irrigation canals or ditches, as they’ve been unnecessary. An analysis from U.S. think tank the Stimson Center suggests the project will leave communities south of the canal, like Kok Nuer, deprived of water. By contrast, it predicts those north of the canal will be inundated, as rainwater and floods will have nowhere south to travel.
However, this is based on incomplete information about the canal’s levees, as the Cambodian government has disclosed only preliminary plans, and key documents such as the environmental impact assessment remain confidential.
“As far as I know, no flood mitigation infrastructure has been included in the designs of the canal to allow floods to pass through the canal to keep critical habitats like the Boeung Prek L’pov wetland thriving during the wet season,” Brian Eyler, director of the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia program, said in an October 2025 email.
When Mongabay first contacted Eyler about the project in late 2024, he explained that what limited plans had been made public showed the canal’s proposed levees would cut across the floodplain east to west. Since the floodwater moves north to south, these levees would stop the water from flowing down into farmlands.
In October 2025, Eyler told Mongabay that he understood the Funan Techo Canal’s plans had been updated to include dry-season irrigation functions using water from the Mekong mainstream. Typically, the government has made little information about these plans public. Although the addition of irrigation features would require official notification to the Mekong River Commission and agreements from all member countries, these plans remain closely guarded.
“The Cambodian government has held up binders of plans in public press conferences, but they do not release this information nor make it public,” Eyler told Mongabay in October 2025.
Areas assessed by the Stimson Center as being at risk of flooding following the canal’s completion include the new Techo Airport in Kandal province, but without being able to see the government’s plans, it’s difficult for analysts to know how severe that risk is.
The $2 billion Techo International Airport, inaugurated in October 2025, has itself led to violent land disputes and still more communities fear eviction by the airport’s developer to build luxury accommodations.
Rights group Licadho estimated that some 734,000 Cambodians were displaced by land-grabs between 2000 and 2023, and now the Funan Techo Canal looks set to increase this number.
“So we have no more information on the project or about how much compensation we’ll get if we have to leave,” said Kaem Sreng, a farmer in Pu Kandal village, near where the canal is set to join the Mekong River. “We don’t even know when we need to leave. It affects all of my land, so I don’t know where I’ll go. I only have this plot of land, so if they take it, I’ll lose everything. Now, I feel sick every day since the authorities came to interview me. I’m sick with worry.”
When Mongabay reached out to Sreng again in January 2026, he said the route of the Funan Techo Canal had been altered slightly to avoid having to demolish a school and a pagoda near his farmland. But while this spares some of Sreng’s land, it won’t spare his home along the riverbank.
“I still have no idea about the relocation package,” he said in a phone interview. “We don’t know much about the project, but I don’t know where I’ll move to because the price of land here isn’t cheap, and I don’t know how much compensation I’ll receive.”
A litany of woes, from the Mekong to the coast
Inland, wetlands that serve as key bird habitats are likely to experience a drop in water flow, presenting not just farmers but also fishers who live in landlocked Takeo province with fresh challenges.
Spanning some 8,300 hectares (20,500 acres) in the southeast corner of Cambodia, scarcely 3 km (1.9 mi) from the Vietnamese border, the protected wetlands of Boeung Prek L’pov sustain roughly 6,000 people. All of them rely on the annual three- to four-month inundation of the wetlands for planting rice as well as for fishing, crabbing and raising livestock. Collectively, these activities are worth an estimated $2.1 million annually.
Boeung Prek L’pov also hosts at least 102 bird species, including the critically endangered Bengal florican (Houbaropsis bengalensis), the vulnerable sarus crane (Grus antigone) and the critically endangered yellow-breasted bunting (Emberiza aureola).
These wetlands and their inhabitants are especially vulnerable to climate change, which is already resulting in more intense flooding and droughts as the seasons change. These man-made problems are being exacerbated by the development of upstream hydropower dams and local irrigation projects. The Funan Techo Canal would pile further pressure onto a delicate ecosystem.
“When you talk to people on the ground, they know that the Mekong is so important, they know that they depend on water,” said Daphne Kerhoas, senior project manager at Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust’s (WWT) Cambodian initiative. “Water is life there. It’s clear. But there’s not an understanding that maybe it won’t be in the future.”
Documents submitted to the Mekong River Commission by the Cambodian government in 2023 show only three sluice gates or locks planned for the canal, which Kerhoas suggested isn’t enough to avoid the project causing a severe reduction in the flow of water into Boeung Prek L’pov. The protected landscape will “suffer quite a bit,” according to Kerhoas, who added that the canal’s design could have been updated since the maps were submitted to the Mekong River Commission.
Even before the announcement of the canal’s approval, Kerhoas and her team at WWT were helping farmers in Boeung Prek L’pov adjust to the drier conditions already unfolding due to climate change and infrastructure development. Working with the communities directly, they’ve dug deeper ditches to store more water and closed off disused waterways so no water goes to waste. They are also helping the farmers transition from a water-intensive type of rice to strains that require fewer chemicals and less water to grow. On top of this, Kerhoas said the NGO is planting trees to restore the flooded forests of Boeung Prek L’pov, paying residents for saplings they grow in small home nurseries.
“I really want to make sure that the government is aware that WWT is here, and that we are willing to contribute and help, and we are not against development in general,” Kerhoas told Mongabay in a phone interview. “We are available to help and support in the wetland aspect of how we can make sure that we mitigate, in the best way for everybody concerned, the impact of the Funan Techo Canal.”
Banner image: Fishers in Takeo province rely on the annual flooding of wetlands where they raise and catch a variety of crustaceans. Image by Gerald Flynn/Mongabay.
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
