Hunsenomics and Its Discontents - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 140

about 90 percent of the country's poor live in rural areas. While the statistics show a sharp
fall in the poverty rate over the past decade, millions of rural poor, like many in Trapaing
Prolit, sit on a knife-edge. The World Bank acknowledges that if the 2011 poverty line of
5,326 riels ($1.33) were raised by just 30 cents, the poverty rate of 20.5 percent would
double. 26 The trick to the poverty numbers game, clearly, is in how low one sets the bar.
Agriculture, the engine of the rural economy, has lagged far behind the urban indus-
tries. As a country of rich farmland and plentiful water resources, Cambodia has huge
potential as a producer of rice: 80 percent of the country's cultivated land is still given
over to paddy fields, 27 which has left deep impressions on rural society. The Cambodian
countryside glows emerald green at the end of the monsoon as the first rice seedlings,
painstakingly transplanted into the muddy soil by hand, emerge from the flooded rice
paddies. For 9 million Cambodians—nearly two-thirds of the population—life is dictated
by the cycles of the wet season crop, which begins with the planting of rice seedlings in
July and August, and finishes with the harvest at year's end. In food security terms, too,
rice is of crucial importance, providing three-quarters of the energy intake for the average
Cambodian citizen. 28 The country's reliance on the staple is so strong that it is inscribed
in the Khmer language, in which bai , the word for “rice,” means “food” as well.
Rice production unsurprisingly forms a central part of the Cambodian government's
development strategy. In 2010 Hun Sen set a goal for Cambodia to export 1 million tons
of milled rice by 2015. But Cambodia's rice industry, and its agricultural sector more
generally, remains a case of unfulfilled expectations. Despite paddy rice production more
than doubling from 3.4 million tons in 1998 to 9.3 million tons in 2013, agricultural
products make up just 3.7 percent of total exports by value. By 2013, the government had
fulfilled just 378,856 tons of its rice export target. 29 In part this was due to the shortage
of government capital to buy unmilled paddy rice, but it was worsened by high electricity
and transportation costs—the latter exacerbated by bribe extraction on the highways and
informal “customs fees” at the country's border crossings. Much unmilled rice instead
ends up being smuggled into Thailand or Vietnam and milled there. 30
Another reason for the sluggish growth of the agricultural sector is corruption in the
Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF). Hun Sen and Prince Ranar-
iddh fought for control of the ministry after the 1993 and 1998 elections, and it's easy to
see why. As the ministry with the power to grant forestry and agribusiness concessions,
MAFF has long been a conduit for speculative land deals and agribusiness ventures that
have been made with little or no thought for the long-term health of the rural economy. In
the past decade these deals have involved the forced eviction of thousands of rural poor
from their farms—a human rights nightmare that has undermined rural development and
driven away prospective foreign investors (see Chapter 9). “They get scared off,” said
one foreign business figure. “[MAFF] is full of cronyism and corruption.”