Testing

AGRICULTURE IN CAMBODIA

FOREWORD BY RATHA RAKSA

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CONTENTS Editorial 4

GRET Organization

Agriculture and Technologies 6

Promoting renewable energy for small cale farmers Products 8

Cambodia's newest dairy farm Cambodia in Quratine 12

A return to field

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GRET is an international

solidarity organisation that aims to reconcile satisfaction of essential needs, social rights and environmental imperatives.

GRET has been working in Cambodia since 1988 to improve access to basic services, social health protection and effective sanitation and water systems in small towns and rural areas.

It also supports small farmers while promoting agroecology.

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Terra Michaels Country Representative for Cambodia at GRET

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n Cambodia, 80% of the population lives in the countryside. Poverty reduction and human development, particularly in the areas of health and education, remain an important chal-lenge. As part of the Cambodia Millennium Development Goals, the percentage of the popu-lation living below the national poverty line was reduced from 50 % in 2003 to 14 % in 2017, and continues to decrease.

Despite this promising trend, the majority of people only escaped poverty by a small margin and a significant proportion

of people are near-poor. Only 21% of the population has access to a drinking water network, of which 7% in rural areas.

GRET, in cooperation with populations, provides sustainable and innovative answers to fight poverty in Cambodia, focusing on rural areas. At national level GRET improves health con-ditions by facilitating access to piped water and sanitation through its drinking water and sanitation programmes. also provides technical assistance to small water and electricity private operators to help them expand networks and reach small towns and rural areas.

GRET increases small-scale farmers’ incomes by improving their crop yield and providing access to agricultural water. It raises the added value of products by developing a geographic labelling approach and provides credit services to encourage farmers to invest. By promoting agroecology, GRET also contributes to protecting the environment.

At regional level, it protects the right of indigenous communities while contributing to find-ing solutions to land conflicts and helping smallholders to legally own land.

Public institutions and local authorities CG92, Cird and Siem Reap department of agriculture, FTB, MME, MIH, EAC, AFD, EU, ADB, World Bank, Cambodian ministries and provincial services for Water resources and Agriculture, NSSF, AusAid, ISC Operators, NGO and design offices AusAid, Thrive Network, See/Saw, CWA, REA, Unicef, SCP, Helen Keller Int, FWUC, FWN, Cirad Companies and foundations Find, Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Isea, Artelia, Stone family foundation, Egis, Sofreco

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Promoting renewable energy technologies for small-scale farmers in Cambodia

Four years ago, when the IFAD-supported S-RET project was first launched, the most common question was “what are RETs?” As we soon learned, many communities and policymakers were unfamiliar with the sector. Today, we have come a long way with integrating RETs – renewable energy technologies – into small-scale agricultural production.

By Kaushik Barua, Karan Sehgal, Sakphouseth Meng

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mall-scale agriculture is vulnerable to climate change, and in turn, it poses its own risks to the environment. For example, activities like water pumping, post-harvest processing, and transport overwhelmingly rely on diesel engines. Many of these engines are old and inefficient, not to mention dependent on fossil fuels and their volatile prices. Nevertheless, very few institutions to date have considered integrating RETs in small-scale agriculture. Some of this reluctance is understandable – RETs are often perceived as too expensive or insufficiently tested.

S-RET, however, has convinced many stakeholders that these technologies are viable. To date, the project has implemented more than 4,500 renewable energy units throughout Cambodia and beyond, thanks to partnerships with renewable energy companies, technical institutes, and national- and provincial-level extension staff. Recently, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) selected S-RET as one of their Global Good Practice Projects.

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A look at some of S-RET’s crucial partnerships EcoSun, for example, is promoting a solar portable pump that provides access to water during the dry season for high-value crops. These pumps save each farmer an average of 2-3 litres of gasoline per day.

Lighting Energy Solutions (LES) has collaborated with an Indian company to promote solar dryers, now being used by many farmers to dry beef and fish. Traditional methods of sun-drying expose fish and meat to flies, dust and other contaminants.

Adopting solar dryers improves hygiene (no flies, no dust); efficiency (seasonal barriers are eliminated, increasing drying capacity); and profitability (farmers now sell an average of 6 kg of dried beef per day, leading to average profits of US$20 per day).

LES uses an innovative buy-back approach, buying the dried products from the farmers and retailing

them in supermarkets throughout Phnom Penh through an e-commerce platform. With no marketing necessary, numerous farmers have thus bought additional dryers to increase their production.

LES’s next step is to localize their production to lower manufacturing costs.

biogas energy, not only for cooking (and as an alternative to firewood and charcoal), but also for slaughterhouse waste management, granular production of bioslurry (a highly organic fertilizer), heating and warming chicks, as well as running small-scale machinery such as water pumps.

Green Innovet Cambodia promotes solar poultry incubators through a holistic approach, training farmers along the entire value chain. Farmers purchase a package that includes the incubator system and everything they need to raise chickens. They also receive training on hatching chickens and caring for them throughout the life cycle, as well as operation and maintenance of the incubator. With incubator capacities of 300 or 500 eggs, depending on the model, chick hatching has become the main source of income for many farmers (the majority of them women), earning them US$300 to US$400 per month.

The adoption of RETs has directly improved women’s livelihoods, as well as their health. Many women are now enjoying greater productivity and increased incomes, as well as improved food and nutrition security through activities such as home gardening. Biodigesters have proved to be particularly helpful in this regard. The gas they produce can entirely replace firewood, thus avoiding the health consequences associated with its use – from the physical labour involved with collecting it to the incidence of respiratory and eye diseases caused by close-range exposure to burning wood.

Solar poultry incubators developed in collaboration with IFAD S-RET. © IFAD

Women are now able to sell a variety of surplus fruits and vegetables from their home gardens.

Looking ahead with government and institutional collaborators partnerships In addition to these partnerships, S-RET continues to expand its long-standing collaboration with Cambodia’s National Biodigester Programme. To date, the project has installed over 2,600 biodigesters (units that break down organic matter such as food waste, reducing the amount sent to landfill). In total, these units have led to a reduction in greenhouse gases equivalent to 124,660 tons of CO2.

We have also piloted innovative applications of

The project has achieved these benefits through an innovative grant-based approach. In a first phase, grants were awarded to renewable energy companies for the purpose of testing RETs in the field. This also enabled companies to reach rural areas, where transaction costs of doing business are higher. In a second phase, once the RET was considered viable, companies had the option to apply for an additional rollout grant. These latter grants enabled them to establish supply chains in rural areas, including distribution and after-sales services.

We can see that renewable energy is also offering promising opportunities for new jobs, especially for young people.

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Cambodia’s newest dairy farm offers vision of tech-driven agriculture

Cambodia's agricultural sector is still heavily reliant on traditional, and inefficient, methods of cultivation.

But the Kingdom's newest dairy farm, Kirisu, offers a vision of how technology could play a bigger role in helping the ailing sector offer better yields Written by Andrew Haffner

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he farms of rural Cambodia don’t usually evoke images of milkmaids and butter churns. But then, maybe that’s to be expected in a country where much, if not most of the population is lactose intolerant.

Even in that context, a mixed group of Cambodian and Israeli entrepreneurs are placing a major bet on finding green pastures ahead for the local dairy industry. On a recent morning, Chy Sila and Uri Rahamim navigated potholed roads to make a regular visit to Kirisu Farm, a 300 hectare spread about 35 km outside Phnom Penh and the newest entry to the domestic production side of an otherwise import-dominated Cambodian dairy industry.

The farm only started producing milk in July, but with a bullish initial investment of about $10 million and more than 500 cows and counting, the dairy entered the market as Cambodia’s largest producer of fresh milk, pumping out as much as 8,000 litres of the white stuff per day. As the cows continue to adjust to life in Cambodia, Sila said the farm hopes to bump up daily production to 12,000 litres.

Kirisu now joins the country’s two other dairies, Moo Moo Farms, just across the Mekong from Phnom Penh, and Techo Sen Russey Treb Milk,

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in Preah Vihear province, both of which produce on a less industrial scale.

Cambodians have no traditional uses for dairy in their cuisine, preferring coconut milk to whatever comes out of an udder, and so a herd of imported, pregnant black-and-white Australian Holsteins may

Kirisu farm - Located in Takeo province

seem an odd investment. But for Sila, a prominent Cambodian businessman who oversees a portfolio of companies such as Sabay Digital Media and CBM Corporation, a major food and beverage franchisee, Kirisu Farm is the realisation of a much broader goal of agricultural modernisation.

“This is like a model for the Cambodian agricul-

ture industry,” Sila said, maneuvering a pickup truck down a gravel country road. “Nobody should compromise.” The original seed of an idea for a farm came from a trip to Israel in 2009, about three years after Sila first met Rahamim, an Israeli-American with a tech background from California’s Silicon Valley. Among other things Sila noted in the so-called “startup nation”, he was especially drawn by the advanced agricultural processes on display.

“Having this technology alone is not enough, we need the skill set and the people to manage it. We don’t need a lot of people, but we need good people – higher discipline, well trained, able to operate a sophisticated farm. This hasn’t happened before in Cambodia.”

The Kingdom’s agricultural sector has traditionally relied on labour-intensive practices, and its largely informal nature has not provided much incentive for serious capital investment or agribusiness development. Israel, on the other hand, has taken a path to development that has made the most of its limited land area with a tech-infused approach that Cambodian planners have hoped to emulate.

In the past decade, hundreds of Cambodian university students have travelled to Israel to work and learn in the country’s tech-infused agriculture industry. Agriculture officials in Cambodia have expressed interest in the past of deepening the connection with the Middle Eastern state, and Rahamim says a future partnership with the Israeli foreign affairs ministry could provide additional support in the next few years.

Today, about 60 people now work at the farm, mainly staff hired and training from local areas, but also including a group of Israeli technicians specialised in dairy. Rahamim estimates about 85% of Kirisu’s land, which is leased from the Ministry of Agriculture, is planted over with a mix of corn, tall Mombasa grass and a kind of legume called stylo to produce an in-house feed for the cattle. The farm imported about $1.5 million in machinery to cultivate the leafy mix.

“We have the complete process here,” Rahamim said from a field of the towering Mombasa grass. “We start at the feed crop, but then we obviously have the cows, the milking and processing, the packaging facilities.”

Chy Sila CEO Sabay Digital Plus / Co-founder Kirisu

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I thought, maybe I can bring all this Israeli technology to Cambodia and make a good farm, and at the same time transfer the know-how to the local people Chy Sila, Kirisu Farm

If the system at Kirisu is bottom-up, it’s largely to avoid the major pitfalls that have sunk nearly all Cambodian dairy schemes that have come before.

Pen Miranda has been director of the Dairy Cow Raising Association of Cambodia for about five years now, but he can outline the long arc of his country’s dairy history from its early successes in the 1960s as an exporter with the state-run Apsara Milk Factory.

That bright start didn’t last though, and the sector was all but obliterated through war time and the Khmer Rouge era. Later, in 1998, multinational giant Nestle came in and supported a cross-breeding program between local cattle and imported dairy cows, partnering with local farmers in a bid to create a more grassroots industry.

Despite the weight of the world’s largest producer of dairy goods, the programme ground to a halt in 2002 with little to show for it. Later efforts with multimillion-dollar-price tags also went to naught, including a 2009 proposal from the Mong Reththy Group and a British partner.

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Rahamim (far left), Chy Sila (left), Israel Teiblum (right) and Chhor Rithy (far right).

Photo: Supplied

Today, Cambodians are eating more dairy products than they used to, but are still light consumers in the grand scheme with industry estimates putting average consumption in the Kingdom at about five kilograms of dairy per year. Consumers in Thailand and Vietnam eat about four times that in a year, which is still a paltry heap compared to most residents of European nations who eat an average of hundreds of kilos per year.

That said, agribusiness firms have projected Southeast Asia as having major growth potential of roughly seven billion litres within the next 10 years, boosting the total demand of the largest ASEAN economies to nearly 19 billion litres per year. With increasing demand through the region, the growth of domestic dairy producers seems to be more economically viable – whether that be through local consumption or possibly even exports.

Miranda works mostly with smallholder farmers to promote the industry on a local level. He also worked with the founders of Moo Moo, former Mormon missionaries Kenny Matthews and Matthew Boyd, to import their cows, build a local staff and process animal feeds.

“We work with anyone who seeks our help, but not many farmers are interested yet,” Miranda said. As some explanation for that, he points to a general lack of information about dairy in the domestic ag sector, layered with infrastructural issues, such as inconsistent electricity, that make production difficult."

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If local producers can get the price down, I think it will increase demand, but I don’t think they’ll be able to do that in a short period.

With these conditions, it wasn’t until 2016 and the founding of Moo Moo Farms that Cambodia once again had its own fresh milk producer of any commercial scale. By then, the market had long since been captured by imports from neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand, most of which sells under big brand names like Meiji, Dutch Milk or a slew of yoghurt labels.

Even Cambodia’s homegrown-sounding processor, Angkor Dairy Factory, has been snapped up by milk giants elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Originally founded in 2015 as a joint venture between a local firm and Vietnam’s multi-billion-dollar dairy Vinamilk, Angkor Dairy was fully bought out two years later by the larger partner.

Today, Miranda says, between 80-90% of Cambodia’s dairy products are imported, fetching the lion’s share of a market for liquid milk he estimates to be as large as 300 million litres sold per year.

“First, we think we cannot produce by ourselves, on the domestic side, but then foreign importers think they can sell for a greater price here as well,” he said. “If local producers can get the price down, I think it will increase demand, but I don’t think they’ll be able to do that in a short period.” As he toured the farm with a bank delegation, Rahamim was realistic about the farm’s ability to compete with large outside suppliers.

“We’re not going to capture all of the market, maybe 10-15% of the market at best, but we feel we have the ability to scale up,” he said. “Of course, we won’t expand until we see how we’re doing in the market, but that’s the plan.”

on the act as well, and can tap into the ‘Internet-of-Things’ to communicate with the chips on each cow. With access to steady information, the gates can act on their own to do such tasks as steering cows that may be sick to a quarantine area for examination by the house vet.

Even the fans at Kirisu are smart, Rahamim says.

The ones the team has imported to keep the heifers from overheating can feel and measure the air as it passes the fan-blades, deciding when to turn hard and when to let natural cooling take the stage.

There’s a lot of financial backing that goes into something like Kirisu. Besides Sila and Rahamim, the individual founders also include Kouch Sokly, a long-time partner of Sila’s, and Israel Teiblum, a venture capitalist from the eponymous country.

On the institutional side, the dairy outfit is funded

by Emerging Markets Investment Advisers, a Singapore-based private equity group, and Nexasia, a Japanese fund that focuses on projects in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Eventually, Sila says, the hope is that the farm will be producing enough milk not only to prove its investment a success, but to change the face of the domestic dairy industry.

“Right now, [milk] is expensive because it’s imported, and so it’s limited to just the middle and upper classes,” he said. “When we get production up, I hope to lower costs so everyone can drink it.”

Both he and Sila are quick to emphasise the technical proficiency of their farm, the name of which translates from Khmer to ‘mountain of paradise’.

The operations of Kirisu run on a management platform known as Afimilk, an Israeli-made enterprise software, and each heifer on the farm is implanted with a chip that collects the animal’s biometric data and reports it back to the system, which can study it in real time.

With the help of that data, the dairymen say, the computer can tell when their cows are most-fertile, when they’re ready to give birth and when they’re showing the earliest signs of illness. The gates that open and close to steer the flow of the herd are in

Some of the team behind the new Kirisu dairy farm and milk production plant in Takeo province. Supplied

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A return to the fields Cambodia in quarantine

Once the largest single industry in the Kingdom, Cambodia's agricultural sector has shrunk significantly with the growth of industrialisation. Now, with few other options as the economy stalls due to the pandemic, Cambodians are once again going to ground Written by Andrew Haffner

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espite decades now of rapid industrialisation, Cambodia is still largely a rural, agrarian nation of hamlets and dirt roads, rice paddies and lotus fields.

About 40% of Cambodians are engaged in agriculture as their main occupation, and Phat Sokha is one of them. The farmer is a commercial grower, a smallholder in Kandal province who makes his living from the land south of Phnom Penh.

The work isn’t easy, but, as the rest of the economy falls into sharp decline due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Sokha is doing relatively well for himself.

“Before, I would sell directly to the market,” he said, bundling leafy clusters of bok choy. While pandemic conditions have thrown prices into flux, Sokha has found himself in a rare island of stability – as a member of a farming co-op, his prices and buyers were locked in pre-pandemic. “This is less risky, since I already have the price, we can just focus on growing.”

Such guarantees are rare in the world of farming, where a livelihood can make or break on increasingly fickle weather patterns. Last year, drought conditions across the Mekong region caused rice crops to fail and harvest to decline, putting farmers in a bind across Thailand and Cambodia.

This year, however, is a fairly good one to be a farmer – or, at least, a good one to have some land to return to when livelihoods elsewhere have failed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has effectively levelled much of the Cambodian economy, wreaking havoc on garments, construction and especially tourism.

But agriculture – perhaps Cambodia’s most con-

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Phat Sokha and his family grow vegetables for consumer

sistent economic sector, yet increasingly marginal in the country’s runaway GDP growth – also seems to be the least dramatically affected by the severe disruption seen elsewhere.

Indeed, by some metrics, the industry is looking relatively sunny.

Song Saran, CEO of exporter Amru Rice and current president of the 200-member-plus Cambodia Rice Federation industry group, said pandemic conditions had actually boosted demand for the Kingdom’s rice, particularly its fragrant varieties.

logistics issues. More ominously, Saran said the biggest knock to supply has come from the effects of climate change, which have parched the Mekong region and forced rice farmers to break traditional time-tables of planting and harvesting based on seasonal rains.

Shipments of long-grain rice have been up 50% over the past seven months thanks in part to panic buying and stockpiling, both on an individual and large-scale level. “Rice has played an important role in the pandemic, but we’re thinking beyond that,” Saran said, describing the expansion as an

Amru is drawing from its own stockpile built up in January to send product abroad. With crops failing earlier this year and needing to be replanted, Saran says the next harvest, expected this fall, could see typically alternating crops of wet- and dry-cultivated rice coming due at the same time. That’s an abnormal outcome that could add further headache to farmers trying to recoup on an already difficult year.

“The drought has been tough,” Saran said, “farmers have been forced to make choices to save their harvest, which has meant deciding when and how to replant.”

Rice is the dominant crop in Cambodia, but agriculture is also typically categorised to include forestry and fish products. Historically, this broad category has been the dominant sector in Cambodia’s economy and, at least in terms of employment, continues to hold sway over some 40% of the national labour force. But as the country has industrialised, the agricultural sector has dwindled in its contributions to the cash economy.

Household agriculture, traditionally the main driver of poverty reduction in Cambodia, was edged out of that role by wage labour in about 2013.

opportunity to promote new technologies and crop diversification schemes among the nation’s farmers.

“After Covid-19, we don’t want to keep pushing rice.”

Part of that is because the strong demand has collided with shortages in supply – not due to anything pandemic-related, but to domestic productivity and

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In 1995, when the Khmer Rouge holdouts still held territory in Pailin province, value-added agriculture represented about 47% of the country’s total GDP. By last year, after two decades of investment in manufacturing, construction, tourism and assorted services, that share had dropped to just over 20%, even while overall production has increased.

According to the World Bank, last year the combined economic value of Cambodia’s agricultural products was about $5.6 billion, up by a little more than $4 billion from 1995.

The increase was driven in large part by an increase in the amount of cultivated land, as, by and large, modern agricultural techniques and technology remain underutilised in much of the Kingdom. As production and harvest yields have increased, the actual economic growth sourced from agriculture has declined in relation to other sectors.

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Yang Saing Koma

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Founder of the Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC), a vocal advocate for Cambodia's agriculture renaissance.

We’re pushing people at the local level to raise animals, grow vegetables, raise fish H.E Hean Vanhan, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries

The industry, which includes forestry and fish farming, received just 1% of incoming foreign direct investment (FDI) last year, the remainder of which went to the more dynamic industries like construction.

Still, at the present moment when these little dynamos have been left to spin out their energy in a recessed global economy, agriculture has provided a sort of makeshift safety net for people who have found their wage hours slashed by the downturn.

H.E Hean Vanhan, secretary of state for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, told the Globe the ministry had issued an official set of recommendations in part urging the public to step up production however they can.

“We’re pushing people at the local level to raise animals, grow vegetables, raise fish,” Vanhan said when describing his ministry’s approach to the Covid-19 landscape. “It doesn’t matter if it’s formal or informal.”

The push to return to the land has echoed down from other high places as the economy has ground down. Prime Minister Hun Sen has, repeatedly in recent months, urged Cambodians to use the country’s agrarian background to eke out a living.

In a speech in Prey Veang province’s Freshwater Aquaculture Research and Development Center, the prime minister touted the sector as a way forward through the downturn.

“We have to remember that we are an agricultural country,” Hun Sen said, according to the Voice of Democracy media outlet. “[Covid-19] is not only not hurting [Cambodia] but it also allows us to dominate in the agricultural sector.

That is why the government has quickly changed direction to push for [financial support in] the agricultural sector at large.”

The agricultural sector is largely untaxed in Cambodia, part of a political calculation by the prime minister to maintain rural support. The World Bank cautioned in its May report that the industry here, already labour-dependant, is unlikely to be able to absorb the excess manpower now laid off in other industries, as well as returning migrant workers leaving jobs in Thailand.

and consultancy firm AgriSmart, while proposing that laid-off workers from other industries could return to their home provinces and, with government stipends in hand, go to work in the fields.

“They supply the agriculture sector with more workers,” he said of these workers. “We have jobs for them to do in the field of agriculture.”

In tourist-reliant Siem Reap, the Globe spoke with several workers who saw agriculture not as an economic opportunity but as a last-ditch safety net to keep food on the table. This activity has ranged from home-made frog ponds to plans to join relatives in the countryside to help raise vegetables and other animals.

When Sean Sreymom lost her job at a local non-governmental organisation, she and her family looked to the land while cutting costs at home.

“This is my Covid garden,” Sreymom said with a smile, showing off the cultivated strip between the side-by-side houses owned by members of her family. With more time at home, this kind of micro-scale planting has been an attractive option for those like Sreymom with a budget to keep and hours to fill.

She says her brother, who lives outside the city and has more land, is also growing produce to defray the family budget. When her own little garden is ready for harvest, she hopes to make some extra money by selling the assorted vegetables.

“It’s not much, but it’s a good hobby, anyway,” Sreymom said. Even before the pandemic cut the legs out from the global marketplace, Cambodian agriculture tended to subsistence, not a commercialised industry.

About a week after his comments in Prey Veang, Hun Sen announced the purchase of 2,000 rice seeding machines from Phnom Penh engineering

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There exists a range of statistics on the number of subsistence growers in the country. Some estimates from international development groups such as the UN Development Programme suggest about 73% of the Kingdom’s farms operate on a subsistence basis, while Vanhan from the MAFF believes the number is closer to 40%, more in line with the general ratio of farmers in the population overall.

With most of these farmers focused mainly on rice cultivation, the subsistence model still isn’t enough to meet just Cambodia’s needs. The US Mission in the country estimates only about 70% of the country’s fruit and vegetable demand is met by in-country producers, leaving the rest to imports from Vietnam and Thailand.

Song Saran

CEO of Amru Rice and president of Cambodia Rice Federation. Photo: Enric Català Contreras

Regardless of the exact number of subsistence farmers, says agronomist and Grass Roots Democracy party chairman Yang Saing Koma, the proportion of farmers growing only to feed themselves is too high, especially when considering official goals of expanding the sector’s employment potential and regional competitiveness.

He’s not alone in that goal.

“If we continue like that [subsistence farming], I don’t know where we’ll end up,” Koma said.

“Maybe just continue buying cheap things from Vietnam. They’ve already gone to more high-value crops and more advanced industry, they’re very advanced and we’re still struggling, running behind.”

“We have seen there was a period of growth in agriculture [in Cambodia] reliant on an increase in inputs, in labour and land, but the next stage needs to be based on skills and production,” Barua said.

Koma’s agrarian background has translated into his political vision, and now he speaks frequently to the possibility of state guidance to push productivity into more effective cultivation and higher-value crops. To that effect, he promotes an emphasis on “transforming” subsistence farms to commercialised outfits, thus making entrepreneurs out of smallholders and building an industry that provides paid work to more farmers, who might today make their actual money driving tuk-tuks or labouring in construction.

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Kaushik Barua is the country manager for the International Fund For Agricultural Development, a United Nations agency that works with national governments to drive smallholder development programmes.

The office’s mid- to long-term programmatic work in Cambodia hasn’t lost its original focus during the economic downturn and, while Barua said there might even be opportunities for local growers during periods of disruption to globalised supply lines, farmers have still been left vulnerable to the loss of cash labour.

“From our reports, the shocks have gone elsewhere,” Barua said. “Agriculture hasn’t been affected directly but a lot of rural families and communities have been affected.”

Agriculture hasn’t been affected directly but a lot of rural families and communities have been affected Kaushik Barua, International Fund For Agricultural Development

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SOURCE

https://gret.org/ https://southeastasiaglobe.com/ https://www.ifad.org/

"Agriculture is a fundamental source of national prosperity."

- J.J. MAPES