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It once took just six hours on National Route 5 to travel the 360 kilometres
from Phnom Penh to the Thai border. Today the journey takes twice as long
in the dry season and longer after the rains, when the road turns into a
river of mud. Mile after mile, the highway is lined with reminders of Cambodia’s
violent past and the years of isolation that followed. Vast plains stretch
southwest to the Cardamom Mountains and inland, northeastward, to Kompong
Cham province. Clusters of mango and tamarind and overgrown drainage ditches
hint at the landscape’s agricultural past. Like the country’s eight million
people, it awaits the revitalisation that peace has promised – but it will
be years before Cambodians can return to any semblance of normal life.

Eight out of ten Cambodians work at some job related to agriculture,
usually rice-growing. But war has left 350 000 refugees consigned to camps
in Thailand, close to Cambodia’s northwestern border. Relentless fighting
has forced another 170 000 Cambodians out of their villages in the north-western
provinces of Pursat, Battambang and Siem Reap, rendering them refugees in
their own country. Those brave enough, or desperate enough, to return home
have found their land overgrown and their houses destroyed. Land mines laid
by Cambodia’s four main military factions – the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer Peoples
National Liberation Force, Prince Sihanouk’s forces and those of the Phnom
Penh government – continue to claim limbs and lives and deter the survivors
from reclaiming their homes, land and former lives.

Clearing these mines is Cambodia’s most pressing need. Bjorn Johansson,
who heads the Phnom Penh office of the United Nations High Commission for
Refugees, estimates that the returnees will need 170 000 hectares of safe
agricultural land, about 2 hectares per family. Nobody dares to predict
how big the eventual shortfall will be: even now there is a huge shortage
of land. Nor is anyone prepared to hazard a guess as to how much land is
being cleared each month. Responsibility for mine clearance rests both with
the Cambodian forces who laid them (in theory, all four military factions)
and with the UN Transitional Authority (UNTAC), a peace-keeping force whose
personnel arrived in Cambodia at the beginning of this year.

Moreover, even if the mines can be cleared and safe land prepared for
the returning refugees, most aid workers in Cambodia predict a messy repatriation
. The first wave, some 6000 people, arrived in Cambodia in April. ‘There
have been no major disasters to date,’ says Howard Dalzell of Concern Worldwide,
an aid charity that has been involved in building two refugee reception
centres in Cambodia, ‘but repatriation is not going nearly as quickly as
it ought to.’ One problem, he says, is that many refugees are wary of being
the first to return.

Johansson expects several later waves of resettlement as people seek
better opportunities for work in different provinces. A recent survey of
families in the border camps showed that 42 per cent of fathers had been
farmers and that most wished to resume farming on returning to Cambodia.
But only 10 per cent of younger people, born and raised in the camps, aspire
to be farmers in the new Cambodia. Even if they wished to farm they wouldn’t
know where to begin.

Cambodia has fallen behind the rest of the world in almost every sphere
of economic endeavour, but especially in agriculture. The horrific events
of the 1970s left the country devastated. Before 1970, it had 3 million
head of livestock and draught animals and exported 400 000 tonnes of rice
per year. By 1979 only 750 000 animals remained, and Cambodia only began
to return to self-sufficiency in food in 1989. In agriculture, as in all
other activities, the newly trained are shy of making decisions. Lack of
contact with much of the world in the past 20 years has left them encumbered
with old and less efficient methods. Isolation has limited their chances
to test their knowledge.

Among those committed to changing this is Chan Tong Yves, deputy director
of the agronomy department in the Ministry of Agriculture. He believes that
Cambodia must now increase agricultural productivity by importing ‘green
revolution’ technology. Cambodia needs more and better fertilisers, herbicides
and pesticides, mechanised farming methods and high-response varieties of
rice that can produce two or more crops per year. But mention the dangers
of replacing well-adapted Cambodian varieties with high-response varieties,
the costs of fertilisers and other inputs and Chan Tong Yves immediately
begins to recommend what seems to be a very different policy based on the
use of organic fertilisers and integrated pest management.

FABLED UTOPIA

Effectively, Cambodian agriculture is back where it was 25 years ago,
despite the attempts of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 to recreate the fabled
utopia of the Angkor civilisation. The Angkor rulers were supposed to have
created their wealth from a sophisticated irrigation system that permitted
the Khmer people to grow rice throughout the year. But not everyone is
convinced by this. According to Francois Grunewald, an agronomist who has
worked for five years in Cambodia, Angkor society’s apparently superior
knowledge of irrigation may have been based more on misinterpretations by
12th-century Chinese travellers than on fact.

Cambodia has four rice ecosystems: rain-fed upland rice, rain-fed lowland
rice, deep-water or floating rice and dry-season rice. The Chinese travellers
reported seeing rice at different stages of cultivation; in the same area
they saw rice being harvested and rice being transplanted. Their conclusion
was that, through irrigation, the same plot of land was yielding two rice
crops. But what they actually saw, says Grunewald, was two different rice
ecosystems side by side. The great canal network they and early French archaeologists
reported may have supplied the cities with drinking water rather than irrigating
the fields.

The Khmer Rouge nonetheless attempted to extend the network to increase
irrigation. They forced Cambodians into virtual slavery to build the dykes
and canals that would achieve a national target of 3 tonnes per hectare.
People worked from daybreak to sunset with one meal per day. But the planners
paid scant attention to topography: many canals were built along map grid
lines, regardless of elevation, and so were simply useless. The regime’s
other strategy was to mimic the Chinese cultural revolution, adopting not
only the ideology that under-pinned it but the technological package that
came with it.

People living around China’s Yangtze River delta built long irrigation
canals which took water to the lowlands after the rains had arrived. In
the dry season, the 1500 people per square kilometre who inhabited the delta
could lift water from the canals back to the fields. The irrigation canals
thus served a dual purpose: helping to control floods and distributing water
to large areas of land that were normally dry.

The Chinese strategy made no sense at all in Cambodia’s upland terraces,
where the Khmer Rouge tried to implement it. At most, the country’s rice-growing
regions support 300 people per square kilometre. Even if comparable conditions
had existed in Cambodia, there were simply too few people to sustain the
labour-intensive Chinese system. ‘On this basis, with the Chinese ideology
and technology plus the myth of the great Angkor irrigation system, the
Khmer Rouge tried to totally transform the countryside of Cambodia,’ says
Grunewald. ‘But if you go there now you will see hundreds of thousands of
dry canals, dykes and all kinds of earth structures, made by the imposition
of slavery, but which are not used at all.’

Cambodia still suffers the consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s inhuman
experiments. The regime forbade the cultivation of deep-water rice, perhaps
because deep-water varieties could not achieve its target of 3 tonnes per
hectare. It moved farmers from the uplands to the lowlands, and vice versa.
The crops failed because the seeds that the lowland farmers took with them
were unsuited to the upland rice ecosystem. Similarly, the upland farmers
were ignorant of the ecology of the deep-water rice land and they ate much
of the deep-water rice seed. Many varieties unique to Cambodia were consequently
lost.

REPATRIATING RICE

Many others were lost when the authorities forced farmers to store all
their rice seed in central stores. The distinct germ plasm collections of
early, medium and late-maturing rice that farmers had maintained were lost
through the enforced communalism. Harry Nesbitt, who manages the International
Rice Research Institute’s Cambodian project, estimates that farmers may
have grown 3000 to 4000 varieties prior to the losses of the late 1970s.
Fortunately, by 1975, at least some of these varieties had reached the safety
of the IRRI’s headquarters in the Philippines, where they have been kept
ever since, in germ plasm banks.

Today, as the refugees trickle back from their camps in Thailand, plant
breeders are attempting to repatriate some of Cambodia’s rice varieties.
One such variety is called Kanlong Phnom and originates from the area around
Tonle Sap, a lake in central Cambodia. The lake is fed by the Mekong River
which, when in flood, can produce enormous changes in the water level in
surrounding fields. Kanlong means ‘jump’ and Phnom means ‘mountain’. The
variety was so named because it can grow fast – 10 to 15 centimetres per
day – to cope with rapid changes in water level. Cambodian and Thai varieties
tend to fare better in the deep-water areas. Some Cambodian varieties remain
fertile at temperatures as low as 13 °C, and others have proved resistant
to pests such as stem borer and gall midge.

In the upland areas, researchers have found that certain African varieties
of rice yield as much or more than Cambodian varieties. But because these
areas were being shelled until very recently, the trials remain unconfirmed.
Elsewhere, IRRI breeders have identified varieties of dry-season rice that
on average yield 23 per cent more than the 1.3 tonnes per hectare of the
varieties normally grown. The good news is that these varieties need no
additional inputs of fertiliser or pesticides; the bad is that dry-season
rice, with its dependency on irrigation, accounts for only 3 per cent of
the rice grown in Cambodia.

Even if more land could be irrigated, the soils of Cambodia pose other
problems. Indeed they are among the poorest in Asia. They suffer not only
from being acidic and sandy but also from being extremely poor in organic
matter, nitrogen, copper, zinc and phosphorus. It is the organic matter
that provides mineral nutrients and buffers the soil against harmful fluctuations
in acidity. For example, inorganic fertilisers, such as nitrates and phosphates,
tend to acidify such soils and decrease crop yield. Nesbitt’s remedy is
to build up organic matter gradually, over many years, by applying green
manures such as the hardy leguminous Sesbania rostrata, which can grow in
water-logged soil.

BREEDING EXPERIMENTS

The bulk of IRRI’s research has been done on the rain-fed lowlands –
the largest of Cambodia’s rice ecosystems. Some 2500 varieties, both from
Cambodia and from other Asian countries, have now been tested there. ‘To
date,’ says Nesbitt, ‘we have not been able to find any variety which is
superior to those already grown in the major portion of the rain-fed lowland
environment in Cambodia.’ The IRRI’s breeders nonetheless want to go further.
They have already begun experiments aimed at breeding a Cambodian ‘super
rice’ – a variety that will yield as much as 6 tonnes per hectare, is 120
centimetres tall (enough to withstand a water level that fluctuates between
nothing and 70 centimetres) and has a stiff stalk that keeps it upright
when the grain ripens.

In the meantime, the new government plans to increase irrigation and
introduce fast-growing rice varieties. But the impact of this on productivity
is bound to be limited. More than 80 per cent of Cambodia’s cultivable land
may be impossible to irrigate, says Grunewald. Where irrigation is not
feasible the strategy should focus on breeding drought-resistant plants
and on better management of scarce water resources. This would not double
or triple production, as growing high-yield varieties would, but at least
it will secure it. And food security – minimising risk rather than maximising
production – is what poor farmers are most interested in.

* * *

1: In the shadow of disease

Health workers in Cambodia predict enormous problems for the 350 000
people expected to return from camps across the border in Thailand. They
will stay no longer than a week in six reception centres, five in the northwestern
provinces and one in Phnom Penh, before moving to permanent sites. Along
the way, says Robert Overtoom of Medicins sans Frontieres, they are likely
to contract diseases new both to them and to Cambodia.

Seventy-five per cent of the camp population has murine typhus, carried
by rat fleas. Once a rat population establishes itself in the reception
centres, murine typhus will follow, Overtoom says. And because the camps
are malaria-free, unlike Cambodia, many of the younger refugees will have
scant resistance to the disease and are likely to contract it when they
return home.

Dirty water is likely to cause the most health problems for the returning
refugees. For 12 years they have drunk chlorinated water in the border camps.
But most of rural Cambodia is devoid of clean and safe drinking water.
In the suburbs of Sisophon, a town in the northwestern province of Banteay
Meanchey, it is not uncommon to find 500 villagers sharing water from a
single pond. They wash in and boil the dirty black water for drinking and
cooking. People displaced from their homes because of conflict and land
mines have attached themselves to such villages, adding to the burden placed
on these ponds.

Returning refugees will be worse off than the internally displaced.
‘All of them will get sick; all will get diarrhoea and most will get malaria,’
says Beat Schweizer, who heads International Committee of the Red Cross
operations in the northwestern provinces. According to Schweizer, three
out of ten Cambodian children die before they reach the age of five. Some
60 000 of the returnees will be under five years of age. ‘If they are not
more vulnerable than the normal population, 18 000 will die,’ predicts Schweizer.
‘But they are more vulnerable.’

* * *

2: The legacy of a brutal regime

Three years after Cambodia’s government liberalised trade regulations
and instituted new laws permitting private enterprise, consumer goods and
private vehicles can once more be seen in Phnom Penh. But the legacy of
war, the brutality of the Khmer rouge regime in the latter half of the 1970s,
the decade of guerrilla warfare that followed, and the West’s indifference
have left the country deeply scarred.

Schools, pagodas, hospitals and other public buildings are crumbling.
The University of Phnom Penh, still the country’s main seat of learning,
looks derelict with its broken windows and unkempt campus. Drive 50 metres
off the handful of main roads that traverse Phnom Penh and the roads degenerate
into dirt tracks riddled with potholes full of rubbish.

The city’s main waterworks at Phum Prek must supply 800 000 people with
water but the distribution system is so full of holes that drinking water
is a significant source of gastrointestinal infection. According to Laurence
Creegan of Oxfam, a British aid charity which has worked in Cambodia since
1979, just 3 per cent of the city enjoys a good water supply, and a further
20 per cent has some water, at least at ground level. But in the remaining
77 per cent of the city the pressure is so low that no piped water reaches
it.

Those who can afford to buy a pump break into the system and sell water
to others. Middlemen fix wheels onto old oil drums and fill them with water.
Poor people buy water from them at 300 riels (about 17p) per drum, equivalent
to the daily wage of a civil servant. One drum is scarcely enough to last
a family of four two days. A nongovernmental organisation called Padek is
to begin an urban development programme which aims to help local groups
organise themselves to provide water and sanitation.

The worst legacy of the Khmer Rouge years is a lack of expertise in
Cambodia. In its attempt to set the Cambodian clock back to ‘year zero’,
the regime murdered educated people, skilled workers and anyone that had
contact with foreigners. Cambodia’s administration today, even at the higher
levels of the civil service, suffers from that decimation. Grant Curtis,
now an adviser for the UN Development Programme, who has worked in Cambodia
since 1987 says: ‘The people who remain as part of the administration were
either trained pre-1970 and require upgrading on 20 years of development
in all sectors, or they have been inadequately trained within the country
or, in some cases, in Eastern Europe in methods or systems or technologies
which are inappropriate to Cambodia.’