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Leapfrogging Agricultural Development: Cooperative Initiatives Among Cambodian Small Farmers to Handle Sustainability Constraints

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Socio-Metabolic Perspectives on the Sustainability of Local Food Systems

Part of the book series: Human-Environment Interactions ((HUEN,volume 7))

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Abstract

Many small farmers across Cambodia are currently facing multidimensional sustainability challenges, such as the need to produce sufficient food for home consumption and income generation, while keeping pressures on land, labour and the environment at bay. This chapter illustrates these challenges through the socio-metabolic analysis of a non-industrialized rice farming village in Kampot Province . Apart from these challenges, the chapter also describes how some villagers have adopted a series of ‘low-capital’ and cooperative innovations and initiatives to handle some of these issues. At the same time, they have partly bypassed more conventional pathways such as green revolution techniques and the transition to fossil LP gas fuels. The adopted initiatives include agroecological techniques such as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), to increase yields while reducing farming inputs; a small-scale biogas system for cooking and lighting; a community bank to address villagers’ financial needs; a community-operated paddy rice bank to manage transitory food shortages; and a rice mill association to increase farmers’ market performance. These developments can enhance the sustainability of resource use patterns, understood to be strongly embedded in local socio-economic dynamics. Diffusion of such cooperative, knowledge-based initiatives in the small-scale farming economy therefore bears the potential to leapfrog more conventional agricultural development pathways. Simultaneously, they can foment the creation of local agroecological knowledge, cascading resource uses and the closing of nutrient cycles , as well as economic democratization and a fairer participation of farmers in the food trade chain. Cooperative agricultural development may thus be vital for local sustainable food systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The administrative units in Cambodia are structured as follows: village, commune, district, province, country.

  2. 2.

    The Group for the Environment, Renewable Energy and Solidarity (GERES) is a non-governmental organization, specialized in the promotion of sustainable and renewable energy use. It has a strong presence in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. http://gsea.regions.geres.eu/.

  3. 3.

    No information on land rented out to neighbouring villagers was found and according to interviews it did not play an important role.

  4. 4.

    No information on livestock composition was available that would allow the calculation of LU500 units.

  5. 5.

    For a review and discussion see for example Pingali (2012) and Patel (2012).

  6. 6.

    Comparisons to CO2 emission from car driving are solely for illustrative purposes. They are based on the current maximum allowed EU limit value of 130 g CO2/km for new cars, referring to the generation of CO2 during its use (not including during the production of the car). http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/vehicles/cars/index_en.htm.

  7. 7.

    See SRI International Network and Resources Center, Cornell University: http://sri.cals.cornell.edu/.

  8. 8.

    Transplantation of the seedlings is an agricultural technique through which farmers transplant seedlings from a nursery bed to the paddy field after finishing land preparation. It requires more time and effort than spreading the paddy seeds directly on the field. The latter method is mostly practiced on upland or less-watered rice fields. It is less time consuming, but associated with lower yields and higher seed inputs.

  9. 9.

    Interest rates are as reported by community representatives and not inflation adjusted. Annual inflation in Cambodia was at 4.00 and 5.48% in 2010 and 2011, respectively (World Bank 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Kortenaerkade 12, 2518 AX, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Arnim Scheidel

  2. Department of Commerce, Kampong Thom Province, Cambodia

    Bunchhorn Lim

  3. Ecosystem Services and Land Use Research Centre (ECOLAND), Royal University of Agriculture (RUA), Phnom Penh, Cambodia

    Kimchhin Sok & Piseth Duk

Authors
  1. Arnim Scheidel
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  2. Bunchhorn Lim
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  3. Kimchhin Sok
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  4. Piseth Duk
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Correspondence to Arnim Scheidel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Eva Fraňková

  2. Institute of Social Ecology, Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies, Klagenfurt University, Vienna, Austria

    Willi Haas

  3. School of Environment Enterprise and Development (SEED), University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Simron J. Singh

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Scheidel, A., Lim, B., Sok, K., Duk, P. (2017). Leapfrogging Agricultural Development: Cooperative Initiatives Among Cambodian Small Farmers to Handle Sustainability Constraints. In: Fraňková, E., Haas, W., Singh, S. (eds) Socio-Metabolic Perspectives on the Sustainability of Local Food Systems. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69236-4_8

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