Cambodia Still Has Agricultural Potential on Rice Crop

By Soy Sophea

Cambodia’s top government officials and food production NGO’s agree that Cambodia
has the ability to grow even more rice. They pointed that the rice yield of recent years did not represent the nation’s full potential as a producer of the staple crop.

The Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said early this month that Cambodia has great potential for agriculture. The Premier was speaking to the Asian Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda during a helicopter trip to the Cambodian-Thai border last month. He pointed out the thousands of hectares of agricultural lands which currently lie fallow and require irrigation.

“If Cambodia can learn some lessons from Thai agricultural practices, the volume of Cambodia’s rice export will be higher than Thailand and Vietnam’s rice exports combined,” he stressed.
ODIA STILL HAS...’
The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MoAFF) has predicted that for 2007-08 season, Cambodia will produce over six million tons of rice, similar to the 2006-07 season, when 6,264,123 tons of rice were produced. Of this, two million tons was
exported. However, the Premier explained that Vietnam has planted rice on every
available plot of land and is able to harvest three crops per year.

“They get three to four tons of rice crops per hectare of land compared to Cambodia’s
2.4 tons per hectare,” he said. “If we do the same as Thailand and Vietnam with double or triple the planting and yield, Cambodia will export more,” he added. “We can certainly
afford to do this as the population of Cambodia is smaller than the other two countries.”

The Premier’s optimism is shared by MoAFF Secretary of State for Agriculture Chan Tong Iv. The Secretary of State confirmed that now Cambodia gets just over 2 tons per hectare in one harvest per year. He confirmed that the “…Agriculture ministry wants to introduce double rice planting next year.”

However, he said that care would be taken to ensure that appropriate breeds of rice are sown in appropriate soil types at appropriate times of the year.

He went on to say, “We have three million hectares of rice paddy fields, but we plant rice on only on 2.2 million hectares. It will take time to achieve the Premier’s goal”.

Yang Saing Koma, President of the Cambodian Center for Study and Development
in Agriculture (CEDAC) said that if Cambodia did not follow the rice growing methods set out by Thailand and Vietnam, the nation will not reach its goal.

He recommended that the Cambodian government should have agricultural advisors at the grass roots level to advise farmers, manage irrigation systems and monitor production
output. He said it depends on the government’s ability to balance food security with export demands.

Through his experience with farmers, he suggested that there should be at least three agriculture advisors for each commune involved with agricultural production—today that means 1,000 out of a total of 1,621 communes throughout Cambodia. “If we can do that, we can reach our goals quickly and provide our neighbors with some real rice growing competition,” he said.

“We need to train farmers to grow as much as they can,” he said. “They work so hard but remain unaware of the technical and horticultural advancements made over recent years.
Water supply is another area that requires attention.”

These suggestions are likely to cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, CEDAC’s President agreed with the Premier in saying “We certainly have the potential
to create an agricultural boom, but we have to reform first”.