Living Conditions & Farming in Cambodia

This time, I visited Pursat in a different manner. This time we did not just base ourselves at the Sylvia Lasky Memorial School, an open aired building which provides free English classes twice a day to one hundred students. Instead, we went to the homes of many of the families in the project. It was at that time that another level of Cambodia life opened itself up to me.

I say that we visited the homes. But these were not really homes, they were solely shelters from the elements. These shelters where simple grass and bamboo structures, one room with no electricity or running water, usually with straw mats to sleep on.

The families that live in these huts are rice farmers but have only a basic subsistence living. Few own their own land, many of them having sold whatever ownership they may have once possessed after a series of floods and droughts ruined their yearly rice crop. As there is no legal control on money lending, persons in need must often take out loans at eighty to one hundred percent interest on the value of the loans. When farmers do this to simply feed their families and have a bad crop, they lose everything.

Now these families rent another person’s land. In exchange for this use, they give the owner a shocking thirty to forty percent of the profit from their rice. As they must first pay back the landlord for use, the rice the farmers grow often does not even go to feed their own families. The extended and bloated bellies of many of the under-nourished children who stared, cried and waved at us as we wandered through their village was a testament to this sad fact.”

Sustainable Cambodia has now started buying the rice supplements for the most indigent families from the farmers who produce enough rice to sell and whose children are in the program. By cutting out the middleman at the rice mill we are getting more rice for the families and giving the farmers more money than they would get from the mill. These are the types of "win-win" capacity-building solutions we are seeking in our work in Pursat.