Cambodia's Jobless Should Take Up Farming Says Minister

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Re: Cambodia's Jobless Should Take Up Farming Says Minister

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

Doubts raised over plan to urge former migrants to farm
6 min read

20 July 2020
Siem Reap province – Pai Pun was excited when he was invited to join a meeting in May on a new work opportunity at Kantraing commune office in Siem Reap province’s Prasat Bakong district after returning to Cambodia from Thailand at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown there two months earlier.

He and 30 other migrant workers sat close together on long wooden benches while officials from the provincial agriculture department asked them if they were interested in growing vegetables or raising farm animals.

“I told them [commune officials] I am very interested,” he recalled in an interview earlier this month. “I was so happy, but now I feel there has been no progress because I did not hear from them.”

“They said they would give me seeds but I don’t know what kind of seeds they would give me,” he said. “I told them I don’t have land. I don’t know where and when to start [farming].”

In a speech in Prey Veng province’s Peam Ro district last week, Prime Minister HE said returning migrant workers and others who are currently unemployed should consider farming to boost the agricultural sector.

“I appeal to everyone, garment workers, and migrant workers who have returned from Thailand to take part in agriculture,” he said.

Last month, Labor Ministry spokesman Heng Sour said roughly 110,000 workers had returned from Thailand alone between March and May after the country went into lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Sour could not be reached for further comment this week.

Yang Saing Koma, an agriculture expert said it was unlikely that Cambodians returning from abroad would start their own agricultural endeavours.

“It is such a huge number [of people], but we don’t think they could start in agriculture on their own,” he said. “They will want to look for employment from others.”

However, some provincial officials have said they have projects in the works that would help migrant workers start farming.
Full article: https://cambojanews.com/doubts-raised-o ... s-to-farm/
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Re: Cambodia's Jobless Should Take Up Farming Says Minister

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Will Cambodia’s Shift in Focus to Small-Scale Farming Work?
Is the COVID-motivated shift enough to support all the laid-off garment industry workers? Who will really benefit?
By Len Ang
July 29, 2020

The Cambodian government has reverted its focus to small-scale farming amid COVID-19 to address the massive number of laid-off workers from the garment, tourism, construction, and transportation industries. Typical rural Cambodian farmers own small-sized landholdings and lack technical skills in agricultural cultivation. There are doubts if such a move can substitute for the job losses in the COVID-19 affected sectors.

This is seen as a strategy to support the continuation of the benefits from the European Union’s (EU) tariff-free trade privileges under the “Everything But Arms Agreement” (EBA). The EU will still support Cambodia’s rice and agricultural products, according to a joint EU report.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the government had confirmed partial withdrawal of the EU’s EBA over concerns about human rights abuses and democratic decay. When it takes effect on August 12, 2020, the partial withdrawal of Cambodia’s trade privileges under EBA is likely to be hardest felt in the garment, footwear, travel goods, and sugar industries. The impact could cost around one-fifth or 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) of Cambodia’s annual exports to the EU.

In the time of COVID-19 the Cambodian government has so far been praised for its successful measures to contain the virus. This success may be due to long-established practices of wearing masks when people are sick and the government’s apparent effective policy measures. There have been no confirmed cases of community transmission.
Only recently the Ministry of Health has alerted citizens to take precautions, avoiding the potential for community transmission after two spikes with 26 and 23 imported cases detected within just five days. The total number of confirmed cases was just 226, with no deaths, as of July 29.

The Kingdom’s success in containing the virus at this moment does not mean that the virus has had no impact on Cambodia’s economy. The World Bank estimates that Cambodia has experienced its slowest growth since 1994, ranging between negative 1.0 and negative 2.9 percent. An earlier report estimated that the slowdown of the economy could increase poverty from 3 to 11 percent if COVID-19 lasts for six months (it has).
With this economic slowdown, Cambodia has experienced unprecedented numbers of laid-off workers, suffering 390,000 job losses in domestic employment along with 100,000 unemployed migrant returnees from Thailand. This figure excludes hundreds of workers from Malaysia.
While the exact number of affected workers remain unclear, travel restrictions alone have affected over 600,000 workers employed in tourism, and over 200,000 workers employed in construction work.

Recently the government has made efforts to hand out cash packages to poor and vulnerable families, offered provisional support for loan holidays for garment factories as well as the tourism, transportation, and construction sectors, and provided $40 per month to garment workers.
In addition to this, Prime Minister HE has encouraged laid-off workers and migrant returnees to embrace small-scale farming and vowed to provide technical support to farmers. According to HE, he would inject $100 million for improving irrigation systems for agriculture and creating short-term employment in rural areas.
Many experts have been skeptical that the plan for small-scale farming can substitute enough jobs for all workers laid off from garment factories and the potential loss of EBA benefits. The agriculture sector’s performance is weak, according to a Work Bank report.

Despite 80 percent of Cambodians living in rural areas, with the majority depending on agriculture, a large proportion of small-scale farmers are near landless. A large proportion own fewer than 0.5 hectares. This proportion of landholdings provide less than half of the nutritional needs of a typical rural family. According to the World Bank, 10 percent of Cambodian rural families are entirely landless.

Cambodia’s program on social land concessions (SLCs) has supported rural poor and vulnerable farmers to address the issue of landlessness. The issue of near landlessness and landlessness may result from the large scale of unprecedented economic land concessions (ELCs) affecting indigenous communities and rural farmers, which the government focused on in the 2000s before the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, the government has granted of a total of 1,178,646 hectares of land in 19 provinces as ELCs.
Full article: https://thediplomat.com/2020/07/will-ca ... ming-work/
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Re: Cambodia's Jobless Should Take Up Farming Says Minister

Post by Duncan »

Many farm products are already sold very cheap. Producing more will just make those products even cheaper to the stage of making them not even worth harvesting. How much cheaper can one grow , harvest, transport and sell bananas at 2,500 r a bunch or mangoes at 3,000 r a kg. and until there is a better quality and control for export or canning on a large scale, I cannot see how putting more to work on the land will make things any better.
Cambodia,,,, Don't fall in love with her.
Like the spoilt child she is, she will not be happy till she destroys herself from within and breaks your heart.
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Re: Cambodia's Jobless Should Take Up Farming Says Minister

Post by Dunderhead »

It's neofeudalism 2.0. It's the best system for the 0.00001 % that make the decisions and it will be implemented worldwide. There are a few holes in the fence if you look but most of the sheeple are blind to what's coming
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Re: Cambodia's Jobless Should Take Up Farming Says Minister

Post by Phnom Poon »

Dunderhead wrote: Fri Jul 31, 2020 9:44 pm It's neofeudalism 2.0.
exactly right
it's almost painfully transparent in this case
especially when they walked it back when the issue of land access/ownership was raised

.

monstra mihi bona!
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Re: Cambodia's Jobless Should Take Up Farming Says Minister

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For Many Returned Migrants, Official Advice to Just Farm Is Unviable
7 min read
Mech Dara and Ananth Baliga
Thu Sep 10, 2020 12:18 pm

KAMRIENG, Battambang — Like many rural Cambodians, Sun Vith hoped to grow corn and cassava in Kamrieng district, not far from the border with Thailand. The 29-year-old borrowed a $2,700 microloan and his brother, Sun Vath, borrowed a further $630 to start the farm.

The harvest failed miserably in 2017 on account of a drought and insect infestation, leaving the brothers with only one option to pay back their hefty debt: migrate to Thailand.

For the last three years, the Sun brothers and their wives have been doing laborious work at Thai fruit farms, using weekly worker permits to travel across the Ban Laem International Border Crossing.

When Thailand closed the border in March to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, the four Kamrieng residents had little option but to return to Cambodia. And they were immediately faced with the prospect of no job opportunities in the district and a government leaning on rural Cambodians to embrace agriculture.

“We have already gone bankrupt doing farming. We have already experienced this kind of work,” said Vith, shaking his head

“Farming is for the ones who have land and materials. It is OK for them,” Vith said. “I have to rent everything so it is not good.”

“If the state had some money to give people, then we could still try to raise some animals,” he said, adding that farmers can sell cows for up to 2 million riel, or around $500.

The hard work of harvesting and processing longan fruit in Thailand earned Vith and his relatives around $9 a day each, at best $15. With some of their savings they were able to pay all of the $630 loan but a large chunk of the $2,700 debt remains unpaid.

Hesitant and financially unable to invest in agriculture, Vith and his sister-in-law, Loeun Any, have relied on harvesting corn. The work is few and far between and earns the two families a little more than $10 for around nine sacks of corn, which can take the group a whole day to collect. Vith said it was barely enough to sustain their households, let alone pay back their loan.

The International Organization for Migration released a report in 2019 that showed a third of Cambodian migrant workers already had no job before leaving Cambodia and half had no steady income, making their prospects upon return seem unlikely.
https://vodenglish.news/for-many-return ... -unviable/
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