During the good times, Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai traders snapped up baby Siamese crocodiles from breeders like Kang Sarin for 200 dollars apiece to feed an insatiable global market for skin and meat.

But a rush by Cambodians to open their own farms and cash in during the 1990s has created massive oversupply and overseas traders now own enough crocodiles for their own breeding programmes.

Today, Kang Sarin earns just 30 dollars for one baby crocodile sold from his farm, the largest in Phnom Penh, and like farmers at more than 1,000 crocodile breeding centres, he faces a bleak future.

"I am worried, very worried, that there will be no market for these baby crocodiles in the near future," Kang Sarin told AFP.

Cambodia's farmed crocodile industry faces perilous times. Hit by market forces, the industry also faces international scrutiny because of the endangered status of the Siamese crocodile in the wild.

Cambodia is the only country where the creature remains in a sustainable number in the wild, although with fewer than 200 mature animals, it is barely clinging on.

Conservationists want to prevent the same fate that the animal suffered in neighbouring Thailand where the wild crocodile was virtually wiped out as unregulated farming increased. Only a few also remain in Laos.

All hunting and trade is banned for the wild animal. Even though trade is allowed under permit for the farmed crocodile, the gloom in the industry is palpable and the list of complaints mount.

The skyrocketing price of fish, typical crocodile feed, has doubled this year from 20 to 30 cents per kilogram to more than 50 cents as stocks fall in the kingdom, Sarin said.

And he has 200 hungry adult crocodiles to feed. "I can't provide the same amount of food to my crocodiles any more," he complained.

Nao Thourk, head of Cambodia's fisheries department and owner of some of the kingdom's largest farms, says breeders must start raising and processing crocodiles themselves to ensure any future. "Raising crocodiles for skins is a much more sustainable business," he said.

But after decades of conflict that ended only in 1998, the destitute kingdom is ill-equipped to launch a sophisticated skin processing industry, although Nao Thourk said talks were under way to bring Australian experts here to help.

Poaching persists of the wild Siamese crocodile and conservationists complain about slack industry controls.

Only six of the more than 1,000 mostly small-scale farms here are registered under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the global conservation treaty that Cambodia has signed up to.

"Farmers readily accept crocodiles brought in from the wild by fishermen, hunters or someone who happens to find one," said Boyd Simpson a crocodile specialist for conservation group Flora and Fauna International (FFI).

"The wild population is being slowly whittled down because so many people are fishing in the waterways."

FFI have recorded 61 crocodiles being taken from the wild alive in the last three years alone.

"There is a lot of concern about the number of unregulated farms," said James Compton, director of the Southeast Asian branch of TRAFFIC, which monitors the international wildlife trade.

"The fisheries department faces a major uphill battle to control the number of farming operations currently in Cambodia."

Some 42,000 live crocodiles were officially exported in 2002, around two-thirds to China and the remainder to Vietnam, believed to be much less than the actual figure, activists say.

The other fear is of hybrid farmed crocodiles -- crosses between Siamese crocodiles with other more aggressive species -- escaping and threatening the genetic purity of the few left in the wild.

"If they get out, you could start to see attacks on people and contamination of the wild stock," warned FFI country director Jenny Daltry.

The Siamese crocodile has never been recorded attacking people in Cambodia, where people in two areas still swim, fish and bathe with them.

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