Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

by Joel Brinkley

  In Pailin Province, the governor, a former messenger for Pol Pot now wearing one of those signature tan safari suits, said he was too busy to talk as he climbed into his limousine in front of the provincial office building. In the lobby a bulletin board showed him cutting ribbons and kissing babies, in many cases wearing a military uniform so heavily encrusted with medals that it was a surprise he didn’t walk with a stoop. Down the hall, the deputy governor, Mey Meakk, said simply: “Our main job is to build roads for accessibility and help them improve farming.”

  No one in government offered a view that differed from this one. No one mentioned manufacturing, service industries, technology. Nobody spoke of higher education. Not one official strayed from a vision of his country that differed at all from the goals of the Angkorian kings. But then most of these men, generally in their fifties and sixties, had little if any education themselves.

  When these men were children there were no schools, save those temple classes for young children. Those people who managed to go to school in Phnom Penh generally left the country before 1975 or were killed by the Khmer Rouge. The same held true throughout the Cambodian government. Prime Minister Hun Sen said he left school when he was sixteen to join the Khmer Rouge, which would be quite unusual for a man his age who lived in the provinces. (Some biographies say he was eighteen, but they also list an assortment of bachelor and master’s degrees as well as a Ph.D. that he never earned.) On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment as prime minister, in January 2010, the Cambodia Daily published a long profile in which one of the prime minister’s closest colleagues seemed to let the cat out the bag. Cheam Yeap, a senior CPP legislator, said Hun Sen “only finished grade three or four before joining the resistance. Even though he studied a little bit, he learned very fast.”

  Aid workers, meantime, worried that the people’s continuing ability to live by nature, as all of these government officials were advocating, was simply not sustainable. “They have eaten all the cobras, most of the lizards, the pythons,” said Javier Merelo de Barbera Llobet, who worked for Catholic Relief Services in Battambang for more than two years. “The trees are gone. And the monkeys are almost all gone. They are a great delicacy now.”

  But starting in the mid-1990s Cambodia acquired a new industry, a new source of wealth. Several Asian nations, principally China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, on their own initiative, began building garment factories in Cambodia. They saw the low-wage labor market as particularly attractive. Over the following years the number of these factories rose to more than three hundred. They employed as many as 380,000 Cambodians, primarily women. The workers made jeans, T-shirts, baseball caps, and sweaters, primarily, and sold almost three-quarters of their products to the United States. The factories grew to produce 70 percent of Cambodia’s exports. The only real competition was rice.

  The government encouraged expansion of the industry; it actually produced legitimate income—taxes and fees. But it also made the government quite vulnerable. As Ambassador Joseph Mussomeli put it, “The economy has three legs: garments, tourism, and agriculture. Levi Strauss or the Gap could destroy this country on a whim.” When the world economic crisis hit in 2008, Mussomeli’s dark vision came true. Orders from American retailers plummeted. Tens of thousands of Cambodians lost their jobs. But Hun Sen had a ready solution. “Unemployment hasn’t caused a very big crisis for our country,” he insisted, because “those people can go back to the fields and grow more rice.”

  Sorasak Pan, deputy minister of commerce, was one of the few who had a different idea, though his ambition was limited—he advocated a different sort of farming. “We can export Cambodian silk to America tax free,” he said with smiling enthusiasm. “It’s a handicraft for women who can raise silkworms at home. You know, if silkworms eat a different kind of leaf, they produce a different kind of silk. Here they can eat mulberry leaves. This hits two things, poverty and gender. It’s true that Cambodian silk is rougher than Thai silk. But it lasts longer!”

  Sorn Kimseng was deputy executive director of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce. He represented Cambodian businesses, so that colored his opinion. Still he said, “Actually it is good we invest in agriculture. But if it is only agriculture, Cambodia cannot recover. We need to focus on industry more. If we focus only on agriculture, so much of the country will remain undeveloped. And when agriculture has a problem, we cannot control it.”

  In Channy, president and CEO of Acleda Bank, one of Cambodia’s largest, with 220 branches across the nation, said, “I have a different view.” He wore a blue suit and white shirt with a gold-and-blue-striped tie. His corner office was pleasant but not grand. Among dozens of Cambodian officials and businessmen, he alone said clearly, “We continue to get lost. We need to expand business, but to establish a company here is so complicated. It discourages entrepreneurship. You lose so much money, so much time. Here it takes at least forty-five days to start a company. In Singapore it takes thirty minutes, and you can do it online. The government needs to shorten registration time, remove barriers for imports.” What’s more, “the transport costs are three times what they are in Vietnam. There are time delays on imports, and you have to pay a lot on the way. Customs, capital control, agriculture ... several parties are involved,” meaning several agencies taking bribes. “If they do not remove these barriers, we cannot move forward.”

  Kang Chandararot, head of the Economics Unit at the Cambodia Institute for Development Study, worried about a related problem. “The prevailing risk,” he said, “will continue to be conflict of interest in general. Businesspeople are at the same time members of government, making policy.” He mentioned Mong Reththy, the oknya and senator who dominated the palm-oil business, as an example. “They can crowd competitors out. That makes it difficult to grow. That’s why we need an anticorruption law.” Mong Reththy himself suggested that not even an effective law would help. “Most companies have two sets of books,” he said. Living without corruption, “that’s impossible for Cambodians. It’s just not possible. You are not Cambodian, so you cannot understand.”

  Cambodia’s constitution forbade conflicts like Mong Reththy’s. Article 101 said: “The functions of members of the Royal Government shall be incompatible with professional activities in trade or industry and with the holding of any position in the public service.” But then no one in government paid any particular attention to the constitution, written during the UN occupation. As Sihanouk perceptively explained in 1996, “The public is not concerned about liberal democracy. Everything is very special in Cambodia. The reality is, their government is judged not so much on how democratic it is but how many bridges and roads and hospitals they build. The constitution is a paper monument. We consider it a monument.”

  Even without all of these obstacles, the nation was still hard-pressed to move forward when 88 percent of the nation’s people had no electrical service. This group included almost everyone outside of the capital. “Eighty percent of our supply goes to Phnom Penh,” said Keo Rattanak, director general of the Cambodian Electric Company. He was a tidy-looking businessman with two computer monitors on his desk and neat, color-coded file folders. Expanding electrical service to the rest of the nation, he seemed to say, was economically impossible because the government sucked his company dry. It ordered him to give subsidies to the poor, the vast majority of his customers, “but then they don’t pay us back to make up the difference.” The Asian Development Bank provided grants to expand service, but the money went through the government, and officials took a cut. “If we lose money here, it is impossible to subsidize” people in the provinces. “The poorest of the poor are in the countryside. We can’t subsidize them. If the elephant falls, you can’t expect the ants to support the elephant. So we have no strong incentive to reach out. Every time we reach out, we lose more money. I have been very vocal about this. We are part of the government. What do they say? We ‘should be acting like a commercial enterprise and should be more efficient.’ I would
love to be able to do a lot more to lessen the impact of electricity on everyone in the economy, but I can’t.”

  The government said it planned to build several hydroelectric dams that would, in theory, provide electricity to the provinces. China was promising to help pay for them. Few put much faith in that promise. For these and so many other problems, In Channy, the bank president, said, “We need a clear vision from the top. In our society, normally small people follow their leader.”

  In the meantime, Kamlesh Vyas, the Cambodia director of a South Asian NGO who tried to work with farmers in Battambang Province, shook his head as he offered his own analysis. “They are just following the past because that’s all they can do. You can’t impart new skills to people with no education.”

  Tuy Khorn was barefoot, trying her best to tie a heavy rock to a plow blade bound to a tree limb, pulled by an ox. She was trying to dig rice furrows. She was alone; the Khmer Rouge killed her husband in 1997. Her seventeen-year-old daughter wanted to get married to bring a man (or boy) into the household to help out. Tuy Khorn said she was trying to discourage her. She wore a dirty red shirt, a pink sarong, and a white floppy hat in an unsuccessful effort to keep the brutal sunlight off her face. She was forty-two but looked much older. Each time she tied a knot on the big rock and ticked the ox with a stick so it began lumbering forward, the rock tumbled off her makeshift plow blade. Again and again. “Some years,” she said, “I can grow enough rice to last through the year. But if there’s no rain, I can’t grow enough. I don’t know what I will do if there’s no rain, maybe just go by nature.” What she meant was eating fruits and insects and whatever she could find in the wild.

  Eighty percent of Cambodian farmers lived as she did, wholly dependent on the weather to survive. That year, 2009, Cambodia suffered a drought, and climate change already seemed to be bringing on drought conditions more and more often. While Cambodia’s leaders promoted a vision of the future that seemed to mimic Jayavarman II’s governorship in the ninth century AD, they failed to provide the people even as much as the ancient kings had offered. Mey Meakk, deputy governor of Pailin Province, put it this way: “I have no ability to compare life to the period of Jayavarman. But development of the country then was very, very high compared to this day.”

  Angkor thrived because of a sophisticated irrigation network. Zhou, the thirteenth-century Chinese chronicler, noted that the networks allowed farmers to harvest three, maybe four, rice crops a year. Almost no one in modern-day Cambodia grew more than one crop. Early in the twenty-first century somewhere between 4 and 10 percent of Cambodia’s farmers had access to irrigation. Even those few people found it of limited value.

  Just over two hundred families lived in the village of Sangkum, in Kampong Thom Province, and a lovely addition had come to the settlement a year earlier. An irrigation canal sloshed through the center of town, water sparkling and gurgling in the sun. In truth, the canal had been there for more than thirty years, since the Khmer Rouge forced villagers to dig it. Loch Pheach, the deputy village chief, had been one of those slave laborers. “The dirt was compacted, tough as wood. It was very hard work, and they didn’t give us anything to eat,” he recalled. “People died.”

  After the war the canal fell quickly into disrepair. Loch Pheach moved away and returned only in 2000. He found the canal still there, “a scar, a hideous reminder of that terrible time,” now passing only a trickle of water—just enough to make mud. But in 2008 the Asian Development Bank provided money to renovate it. Now, one of the sluice gates flooded Loch Pheach’s rice paddy. Still, “the canal has water only during the rainy season. We’ll have water until November.” So he and the other villagers with access to the canal water still can produce only one crop each year—and that only if it rains. They are little better off than Tuy Khorn, the woman trying to tie the rock to the plow.

  Up and down the waterway, dozens of other families watched the water flow by but could not use it at all. No sluice gates were built to serve their land. With no electricity, they couldn’t use a pump and wouldn’t have been able to afford one even if it had been useful. So, as the water splashed past, they could look at, stick their hands in it—but then they had to turn their eyes to the sky and hope for rain. “If I had water all the time, I would keep plowing,” Loch Pheach said. He was barefoot; his blue work shirt was ragged, his pants full of stains and holes. In a good year, he said, he produced 1 ton of rice on his 1 hectare plot of land (a hectare is about 2.5 acres). As it is, he said, he will have to send his teenage children to Thailand to work if the rains do not come. Asked what he eats, Loch Pheach looked puzzled. “Rice,” he answered, as if there were no other possible answer. In truth, the Khmer verb to eat actually means “to eat rice.” “Just rice. Maybe some fish, if we have money to buy it.” So goes life beside an irrigation canal.

  For all the emphasis Cambodians placed on rice cultivation, the nation provides the lowest yield per acre in Asia. Loch Pheach was able to grow 1 ton of rice on his hectare in a good year, still lower than the national average: 2.4 tons. In contrast, using modern agricultural techniques, Vietnam produced 4.9 tons per hectare, Laos 3.5, North Korea 3.8, Burma 4.0, Bangladesh 3.9—and Japan 6.5. Sorasak Pan, the deputy minister of commerce, lamented the sad state of agriculture. “We have only one rice harvest each year. Vietnam has three, Thailand has two. And we have no irrigation. So we have only one harvest, during the rainy season.”

  Even the piddling quantities of rice the nation did produce were of such poor quality that it could not be sold to developed countries. Exports were shipped to Thailand and Vietnam for processing because Cambodia did not own a modern rice mill—or a lab to certify that the rice was free of disease or harmful chemicals. The few small rice mills Cambodia did have were primitive, and “when rice is processed, the grains break into small fragments, which are not suitable for overseas markets,” Chan Tong Yves, a deputy agriculture minister, told the Phnom Penh Post. Cambodian rice did not meet European or American standards. Outside of its neighbors, Cambodia was able to sell only to parts of Africa.

  Kith Seng, the undersecretary of state in the Agriculture Ministry, spoke carefully, so as not offend his supervisors. But his message was clear: The government needed to do more. Kith Seng was a rare creature in the Cambodian government, a bureaucrat with education and expertise in his field. His office shelves held hundreds of agriculture journals, research studies, and books. He spoke halting English and said he earned a bachelor degree in agriculture from a French-run university in 1974.

  Cambodia has never offered welfare or relief for the poor. The government has never made agricultural subsidies or even low-interest loans available to the public. “This is a totally free market,” Kith Seng said with a rueful smile. “The government relies on the private sector. And whether they build a rice mill will depend on the market. The policy of the government is entirely free market. We leave all of that to the private sector.” What that meant, really, was that the government did nothing. An “entirely free market” does not work even in wealthy nations. The United States, the wealthiest nation, still provides Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, farm subsidies, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and a host of other aid for the poor and not so poor. Cambodia, one of the poorest nations, offered its citizens roads, bridges, and wells. More recently, it tried to offer rudimentary education and health care. But farmers, the hope and soul of the nation, were left entirely on their own.

  When the world economic crisis hit in 2008, Rainsy offered one of his more moderate proposals. In a letter he asked Hun Sen to issue a $500 million stimulus package, for the many thousands of Cambodians who had lost their jobs. The government scoffed, saying, “Sam Rainsy should be able to address this. He is a parliamentarian.” In other words, Rainsy should introduce a bill that the CPP majority would then reject. While the Asian Development Bank said the economic crisis was pulling 2 million people into even deeper poverty, Hun Sen called Rainsy’s idea “not logical. It is opposition
logic.”

  “My own idea, just me, is that first we need to have a strong farmer organization” to lobby the government, Kith Seng said. Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam all had rice growers’ associations. “Now, the farmer has land but not credit. The farmer offers labor and technical skill. So the state needs to support them with low-interest credit. Now they leave that to the private sector, and the private lenders charge them 45 percent to 60 percent a year. Another of my ideas, and I raise it at meetings,” to no apparent effect, “is to support a focus on new enterprise. Give a loan to the association of rice milling to buy new mills.” That idea, too, went nowhere. What happened instead, he said, was that every year “there’s a difference between the community level and the national level. At the community level, they talk about how they do not have enough to eat. At the national level, they still talk about having a rice surplus. And they sell that surplus to Vietnam and Thailand.”

  In 2009 the government declared a surplus of 2.5 million tons and committed to sell it to Vietnam, Thailand, and whoever else would buy it—leaving many thousands of Cambodians, like Cha Veun, wondering where they would find the rice they needed to survive. She was forty-six and had no teeth. She lived on a raised wooden platform, perhaps eight feet by eight feet, with no walls. She said she earned roughly 2,500 riel a day—about 50 cents. The people of her village, Bon Skol, near the border with Vietnam, made earthenware cooking pots for sale at market. And Cha Veun’s pots served as a metaphor for her situation. Hers were miniature versions of the same cookery—toys, she explained. She had lived there all her life but owned no land and could only help other villagers with their crops. “But I don’t earn enough to buy food.” Has the government ever helped her? “Not yet. I want them to help me be not so poor. But it doesn’t happen. And I don’t have enough to eat.”