Project Aims to Make Subsistence Farms Profitable
The Cambodia Daily 12-08-2013: BATI DISTRICT, Takeo province – At a farming school here
last week, 150 poor agricultural workers gathered to celebrate graduating a
two-month training course. The new group of educators will now set out with
their newly acquired skills to help transform the country’s poorest rural
families from subsistence farmers into successful agribusinesses.
One of the new trainers is
55-year-old Neou Ket, a farmer from Takeo province who owns a single hectare of
land. Until now, he has managed to grow enough rice and vegetables to feed his
family and exchange produce for other goods in his village.
But he seeks a more prosperous life
and says to achieve such a reality rural communities desperately need basic
training in how to properly cultivate their land.
“We need to learn simple things,
like when we sow a lot of rice in one place it wastes a lot of seeds, or about
what soil is best or which fertilizer to use and sometimes we use too much
pesticide,” he said, explaining that he wanted to use his recent training to
help modernize the very basic, traditional farming practices in his commune.
Agriculture remains the primary
source of employment for Cambodians—with roughly 80 percent of people still
living in rural areas. Yet while the country has seen a significant reduction
in the number of Cambodians living below the poverty line, new opportunities
are largely bypassing the rural population and most wealth creation has
occurred in urban communities.
The training program at the
agricultural school in Bati is the first stage of the Project for Agricultural
Development and Economic Empowerment (PADEE), a recent joint initiative by the
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Ministry of
Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries (MAFF), the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization
and other partners.
Its goal is to lift the poorest
rural families out of poverty by increasing the productivity and diversity of
the crops they produce such as rice, vegetables, fish and poultry, and if they
have no land to farm, training them in textiles, handicrafts or food
processing.
Under a gloomy gray sky, trainers at
the purpose-built training facility expressed optimism about the project’s
potential as they demonstrated some of the techniques they had learned on the
school’s practice rice paddies and vegetable plots.
One team of new instructors
performed an electrical conductivity test using a battery, to assess the
conductivity of water passed through different types of earth—a quick, simple
and inexpensive way for farmers to check the health of soils and their ability
to retain fertilizer.
Kim Thearo, a 23-year-old graduate
student at the Royal University of Agriculture who helped train the farmers,
held up a cabbage with perforated leaves to show the damage that pests can do
if not properly controlled.
“The big problem for growing
cabbages is flea beetle. It is hard for farmers to destroy them even though
they use pesticide to try and kill them,” he said, adding that growing lemon
grass around the cabbages, ensuring that they get enough light and watering
them early in the morning to wash away the bugs is a more effective way to
control the pest.
Training people to help poor farmers
increase their yields is just one element of the PADEE project’s long-term goal
to empower families on the bottom socioeconomic rung.
The project also plans to provide
them with hard-to-come-by financial capital through group funds and to educate
them in farm and business management.
The rural families targeted by PADEE
are mostly too poor to avail of microfinance—the small, yet high interest loans
lauded by development banks as a solution to rural poverty.
Families are sometimes unable to
access these loans because they are illiterate and unable to fill out forms to
open bank accounts. But in most cases, they either do not have land or when
they do possess some they do not have a title to be used as a collateral.
“For farmers who own only a few
acres of land and rely upon agriculture, escaping poverty is extremely
difficult, so providing access to financial capital is crucial,” said Khalid El
Harizi, country program manager for IFAD.
To determine the poorest families,
PADEE does a so-called “wealth ranking exercise,” which the commune as a whole
must agree with, to identify the bottom 50 households in 246 communes in 36
districts in the provinces of Kampot, Kandal, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng and
Takeo—about 50,000 households in total.
Each group will then receive a grant
of $4,000 per year for 3 years, or about $80 per group member per year, to
operate as a shared account that will enable farmers to access the capital to
purchase produce, material or to use it as collateral for microfinance loans.
Members are expected to help manage the money, borrow from the pot and pay
back it back to the group at low interest.
“The goal is that these communities
will become credit cooperatives, and eventually graduate to become clients of
microfinance and then customers of banks,” Mr. El Harizi said.
To get to that point, the families
will receive mentoring over a 5-year period.
“The farmers are mostly illiterate,
so for example, we can’t expect them all to become accountants. We need
accomplished service providers to help the group master the necessary skills,”
he said, adding that a trained team of mobile accountants would travel between
communes on banking day to monitor the groups’ financial activity.
Recent studies have highlighted the
problems with microcredit and argue that it is not a sustainable poverty
reduction model due to the gap between the intended and actual uses of
microloans.
In contrast, families borrowing from
the PADEE group fund must complete each stage of training to show that they
have acquired the right skills and commitment to enable them to run their
businesses profitably.
Lean Thon, 46, a farmer from Takeo
province with one hectare of land, said his family’s situation was made even
worse when they borrowed money from a microfinance institution to buy more
produce, hoping they could grow enough rice and vegetables to sell.
“We got a microloan and became
indebted because I did not know how to manage my land, but now I can apply what
I have learned with my teachers such as the best ways to grow rice and
vegetables and raising animals that I did not know anything about,” he said.
“Lack of capital is just one
obstacle to agricultural development in Cambodia,” said FAO Regional Marketing
and Rural Finance Officer Ralph Houtman.
“Empowering farmers by training them
to use new technology, helping them to source and use new seeds varieties, and
giving them access to financial markets are all part of an integrated set of
obstacles the PADEE program hopes to address.”
The bulk of the $43-million, 5-year
project is funded by IFAD in the form of a $17.5-million grant and a loan of
the same amount, with the rest coming from the U.N.-funded FAO, the government
and other development partners.
“Funds are provided through strictly
supervised loans and grants. We are a development bank, not a charity—we are
here to help the country, not hand the government money,” said Mr. El Harizi.
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