Rice growers start a business, and invest in their community.

[Kung-fu Hillbilly]

Moul Phally, 28, shows visitors the water purification and bottling system she and her savings group colleagues started to help provide healthy water to her community. “In the past, if children drank unsafe water they got sick, and it cost their family money for medical treatment. If people wanted clean water they had to boil it, so that took time and money. Now that we have this purified water not so many people fall ill.” Savann Oeurm/Oxfam America

By Chris Hufstader
August 20, 2019

“Sometimes, I can’t even get enough water for one harvest,” Vorn, now 62, says. “It just makes me want to give up on farming.”

Water for drinking can also be a problem for her and others in her village, a place called Por Pi. Many of the 146 families here do not have a well, and they get water from streams and ponds. Vorn says it’s not healthy water: “Three or four times a month we had to spend money on health care, for diarrhea and stomach problems.”

To fix this problem, Vorn and about a dozen of her neighbors have started a business to purify, bottle, and sell drinking water. They started it to earn money, but also to help their community. They donate more than 25 percent of their profits to the village in hopes that these resources will someday help solve the water shortage for farming.

Phally, a rice farmer who works on this project, says they pump water from the well, remove any sediment, and run it through a charcoal filter and ultraviolet light before bottling it in 20-liter plastic containers they deliver to clients. In a month they can earn between $250 (in the rainy season when there is less demand) to $1,000 (during the winter dry months).

So far the clean water enterprise has brought in more than $10,000 in its first year of operation and is self-sustaining. Vorn says she hopes her community takes the contributions from the water bottling plant and uses them to help farmers grow more food. “This year I only got 10 sacks of rice due to lack of rain,” she says, as climate change has made rainfall here unpredictable. “With an irrigation system, we could have more water, and we could grow a lot more rice. With enough water, I could get two or three harvests each year.”

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