CHIANG MAI, Thailand — Global wildlife trade authorities say Cambodia has made little progress in cleaning up its monkey export industry, a year after the country was flagged as needing major reforms in how it manages the capture, breeding, and export of monkeys used in biomedical research. In November 2025, following years of controversies, the secretariat of CITES, the global wildlife trade convention, issued a series of recommendations to Cambodia. In a document released Oct. 5, CITES stated that limited improvements to Cambodia’s monkey farm governance mean it “cannot confirm or rule out the occurrence of fraud or corruption” in the country’s trade of long-tailed macaques, a species listed as endangered. The statement comes ahead of the Nov. 2-6 CITES Standing Committee meeting in Geneva, where parties to the convention will assess progress made by countries placed under review. Countries unable to meet CITES standards can face trade bans. Monkey poaching has reportedly declined in Cambodia as the populations and habitats of long-tailed macaques are believed to have declined in recent years. Images supplied by source. Cambodia has faced widespread condemnation since a five-year United States Fish and Wildlife Services (USFWS) investigation found substantial evidence of Cambodian monkey farms laundering wild-caught monkeys as captive-bred. This, experts have warned, heightens the risk of zoonotic disease spillover — the transmission of pathogens from wildlife to humans — while also posing a threat to Cambodia’s wild population of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis), which dropped between 50% and 70% in the last three decades.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

UMPHANG, Thailand — At 8 a.m. on June 26, at least 13 double-trailer trucks were lined up at the Pheung Khleung border crossing in northern Thailand — one of the few places where minerals can be legally transported overland from Myanmar into Thailand. Tensions were running high under the sun. The border gate had not yet opened and irate mineral merchants were yelling at reporters, demanding that no photos be taken. The previous day, the Thai military personnel that oversee the cross-border mineral trade had granted Mongabay permission to document the hundreds of tons of antimony expected to be delivered from Myanmar’s Karen state to Thailand’s Tak province, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of the city of Mae Sot. Reporters were forbidden from photographing soldiers’ involvement in the trade or the minerals themselves. It wasn’t until 10 a.m. that the border gates opened and the first truck from Karen state bearing antimony, a silvery mineral used in bullets, bombs, armor, semi-conductors and other defense, aerospace and tech industries, crossed into Thai territory. Bars of processed antimony were hoisted from Myanmar trucks into Thai trucks at the Pheung Khleung border crossing in June 2026. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay. A crane, followed by a parade of battered trucks, rolled over from Myanmar and instantly workers from both sides frantically began attaching hoisting cables to 1-ton bags of what reporters were told was antimony ore and stacked bars of antimony ingot. Drivers sheltered from the heat as bags and bars…This article was originally published on Mongabay

BANGKOK — Over the course of 2025, the Mekong countries of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam lost a combined 746,168 hectares (1.8 million acres) of tree cover, an area roughly equivalent to the size of the Bangkok Metropolitan Area, according to Mongabay’s analysis*. Data published by the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland, in partnership with Global Nature Watch (GNW) — formerly Global Forest Watch — shows that of the total 746,168 hectares of tree cover lost, more than 154,000 hectares (380,000 acres)  was primary forest. Mongabay’s analysis found that just shy of 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of the total were lost from the region’s protected areas. While these numbers may paint a bleak picture for the Mekong’s forests, the rate of regional deforestation has dropped by almost 25% from that recorded by GNW in 2024, continuing a decline that, according to the data, began in 2023. Fewer wildfires, higher rainfall, stricter law enforcement and lower market rates for commodities could all factor into a drop in the Mekong’s deforestation rate for 2025 when compared to 2024. However, experts warn that short-term drops do not always represent a broader trend in deforestation. Every country in the Mekong saw a fall in deforestation rates from 2024 to 2025, but each still grapples with a range of challenges to protecting the region’s remaining forests. Data from 2025 shows a drop in deforestation recorded across Mekong nations, but much of the tree cover lost last year was lost inside…This article was originally published on Mongabay