Running out of sand

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It is hard to believe but the world is running out of sand. Our insatiable appetite for the substance that makes everything from skyscrapers to smartphones has led to environmental destruction in countries like Cambodia, where there has been a long history of illegal sand mining along the Mekong river. We are in the rapidly developing city of Phnom Penh to hear from the people whose lives and livelihoods have been threatened by the struggle for sand. Those who have fished the river for decades are finding that their nets are empty as the sand miners move in. People living alongside the Mekong have seen their houses crumble into the water as the riverbanks collapse.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 1969, a plan to show support for an anti-racism protest turned the lives of 14 promising
0:07.0	black student athletes upside down.
0:09.8	Amazing sport stories from the BBC World Service tells their story.
0:14.0	Search for Amazing Sports Stories, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:18.0	This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Robin Markwell in Cambodia asking
0:26.6	if the world is running out of sand.
0:30.8	Phnom Penh is a city in a hurry. Here the traffic hurdles fast. People on the pavement down by the
0:38.5	water side, inline skating or dancing to music or cycling through and it reflects really what's going on with the economy here
0:47.2	In the last 10 years dozens and dozens of skyscrapers have suddenly hurtled upwards on the city's waterfront.
0:56.2	New islands have been created out of sand.
1:00.3	It's a sign of a country on the move, but equally it comes at an environmental cost too.
1:07.0	And that's what this program is all about.
1:09.6	The dredging of that sand from waterways has got environmentalists worried. They think it
1:16.6	could cause big problems in the future and I'm going to investigate why. I'm in a car heading upstream along the river Mekong to a
1:29.6	place called Rock a cow. It's about 30 kilometers north of Penon pen. And it's where you can really see how taking
1:36.3	too much sand out of the river to fuel a development boom can harm the environment. The fish that used to be so abundant here have been
1:45.6	disappearing. The persistent scouring of riverbeds and the removal of sand has
1:51.4	harm their natural habitats.
1:54.0	19% of the river's many fish species are now threatened with extinction,
1:58.4	according to a new worldwide fund for nature report.
2:02.1	Fish stocks in the Mekong fell by a third between 2015 and 2020.
2:07.0	Bad news for the more than 40 million people in the Lower Mekong Basin that rely on the fishing industry. And the river bank itself is
	...

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