Cambodians have been crossing the border to Thailand to buy water and ice to sell back home. Meanwhile, Malaysia is considering moves to alleviate the drought, including artificial rain-making.

Thailand’s Provincial Waterworks Authority has a three-month campaign that will see residents who consume less water given reduced fees.

The campaign will compare people’s use of water between April and May, May and June and June and July.

The water authority said the reduction would be up to Bt100.

Meanwhile, a large number of Cambodian workers were seen pushing carts full of bottled water and sacks of ice cubes from Aranyaprathet district in Sa Kaew into Poipet town in Cambodia’s Bantaey Meanchey province.

Reports said more than 100 carts came to Aranyaprathet to buy water and ice cubes between 7am and 10.30am yesterday. It was estimated that more than 100 tonnes of ice cubes and 60,000 bottles of drinking water were bought.

The Thai task force operating checkpoints in the area was ordered to check the carts carefully to prevent smuggling of illegal goods.

A source said a senior Cambodian immigration official in Poipet had contacted his Thai counterpart to help allow Cambodian vehicles to cross to the district to buy water.

This comes at a time when many Cambodian provinces are suffering a shortage of water.

Meanwhile, The Star Online revealed that Malaysia was considering using cloud seeding to curb hot and dry weather conditions caused by the El Nino weather pattern.

But Science Innovation and Technology Minister Madius Tangau said such operations would only be done when there is haze and the air quality reaches unhealthy levels.

“We have received many requests and recommendations to carry out cloud seeding. But we have to consider El Nino as a whole.

“If we do cloud seeding today, the weather will still be hot and dry tomorrow, and the same problem will recur,” he said on Thursday.

However, the fear of hotter days has diminished because the heat wave has weakened and El Nino is expected to have less impact by June.

Tangau said six places in the country had recorded temperatures of between 37 and 39 degrees Celsius as of 4pm yesterday.