Maligned force struggles to douse talk of corruption

Under-resourced, underfunded and much maligned, Phnom Penh's only fire station is a place where idealism has gone up in smoke, Allister Hayman writes.

Phnom Penh Municipal Fire Chief Suon Sopheak stands before one of the eight engines that his 75-member fire-fighting corps has to battle all the blazes that occur across Phnom Penh.

The station, in Chamkarmon district, is the realm of Phnom Penh Municipal Fire Chief Suon Sopheak and his 75 firefighters, who serve the capital's 76 communes - about 1.5 million residents.

Sopheak, 59, sits at his desk in a spartan office. Behind him hangs a Japanese lithograph detailing the famous ladder-climbing acrobats of the Japanese fire service. Japan, like many countries, holds its firefighters in great esteem, but there is little of that in Phnom Penh.

According to Sopheak, it is a tough, dangerous job, with long shifts, little pay, and often little thanks."People don't understand our work and don't respect or acknowledge us," Sopheak said. "This makes it hard. They don't understand there's a method to fire fighting and if we don't succeed they blame us and say we were waiting for payment. And then when we do succeed, they say it's because the people paid us."

On a recent day in Tuol Kok district the talk of corruption in the fire service is rife. On February 2 a blaze in Boeng Salang commune's Psar Dumkor village burned 52 wooden homes to the ground, leaving 129 families homeless.

The residents now live under blue tarps stretched between charred wooden poles, with the few possessions they have left scattered on blankets. The village is a mess of charred wood, twisted metal and burnt bricks. It's hot and dirty, but in the hopelessness there's resilience, and a quiet fury.

Hoa Phally, 32, sits with her four-month-old baby, covered in soot. When the fire started behind her home she fled with her two children. But her neighbors managed to save some of the goods she sold from her small stall by throwing them into the open sewer.

She said her 13-year-old daughter cried to the firemen to spray water on their house. "They told her they would do so, but they didn't. Not until our homes were burned," she said. "The fire workers don't spray water on wooden houses because they know the people have no money to pay them. They save the water for brick and concrete homes because these people have money."

Ngim Sok, 31, said the fire fighters arrived in good time but waited for more than an hour before spraying water. "When they arrived the fire was still far away, but they did nothing," he said. "Two trucks got stuck in the road but they still had hoses and the hoses were full but they did not spray the water. They only sprayed it on the trucks to protect them."

He said he tried to take a hose from a fire truck and spray water on their homes but the firefighters wouldn't let him. "They took it from me and then later used it to spray water on one of the brick houses," he said.

Around the corner, Street 336 is lined with businesses and apartments. Many are burnt out, or have suffered major smoke and heat damage. One owner said the fire sparked more than 100 meters from his home and when the firefighters arrived it was still some distance off.

"If they'd sprayed water it would never have come near these houses," he said. "But they just stood there and waited."

He said the firemen told him they did not have any water left in their truck. As the fire burnt closer he offered them $500, but still they did nothing. Then he went to one firefighter who held a hose and gave him $100. The fireman handed him the hose and he trained it on his home and adjacent buildings. But then the water stopped.

"They turned off the tap, so I went back to the worker and gave him another $100. And the water started again. I had to do this five times," he said. In this way he managed to save much of his home. Further down the street people were not so lucky. Residents here said the firemen wanted $1,000 but they only had $500. Their business burnt out.

At the fire station, Sopheak smiles when asked about the residents' claims. "I don't know if fire workers took money at that fire," he said. "It's just become a habit, this rumor we take money from the people, but when people make a complaint they can never say who got the money and if they do it's always somebody who's not in a fire worker's uniform."

Sopheak said six trucks were sent to the blaze and two became stuck in one of the narrow access roads. "It was a difficult fire to fight and the fire workers tried their best," he said. "Sometimes we don't throw water from some directions because it depends on the wind. You must hose the fire with the wind."

Sopheak said because the fire service does not have enough workers this can cause confusion. "Each truck only has three workers so sometimes the people help with the fire fighting and they take the hoses and water their homes," he said. "But I don't know for sure if people paid money at that fire."

A former police chief, Sopheak was appointed fire chief in 1993 at the end of the UNTAC period. "I had no choice," he said. "I was told by the Ministry of Interior to become fire chief and so I did."

The majority of the firefighters began work in 1993 and like Sopheak they were all appointed from positions within the police department. The fire service has received few reinforcements since and many of the firefighters are in their fifties.

The service is funded through the Ministry of Interior and receives donations and aid from the Fire Equipment and Safety Center of Japan, American nonprofit organization Outreach Emergency Services Program, as well as the governments of Japan and China. But despite billions of dollars of international investment and aid to Cambodia, the fire fighters remain under-funded, under-resourced and the ever-present stench of corruption has not dispersed.

Originally operating with antiquated Russian trucks, Sopheak's men - and five women - received six new trucks in 1994. Each truck carries around 4,000 liters of water and on average about three trucks are required to douse a blaze on a freestanding house. With the addition of two new trucks in recent years - including one from the United States with a ladder - the service now has eight. Not nearly enough to fight all the fires in Phnom Penh.

"The municipality had a plan to purchase more trucks but now that's on hold because I hear China will donate thirty new trucks to the city," Sopheak said. "But I'm not sure when this will happen."

When or if this happens, Sopheak said the service would expand into three stations, with a new substation in the city's north and one in Chbar Ampov in the south. But for now, Sopheak battles on with his aging trucks and aging workers.

Last year, the service responded to about 40 fires, a slight decrease from 2005, but Sopheak said the beginning of 2007 had been particularly bad. He couldn't give exact figures as these are calculated every three months, but said there had been "a lot." Most he said were caused by electrical faults and burning incense.

The firefighters operate in two teams on rotating shifts, which begin at 7.30 am and end 24 hours later when the replacement team arrives. "We have enough people on each shift to put three on a truck," Sopheak said. "But a fire truck needs five people. I've asked the police chief for 48 more people and he agrees but I don't know when that will happen."

Occasionally the firefighters receive training from Canadian and American specialists, but most of their skills have been learned on the job. And on the job they work with only 30 sets of secondhand protective gear donated from the US. "We can wear the jackets but not the pants," Sopheak said. "American firefighters are big but Cambodians are small, so they don't fit."

The firefighters are paid from 90,000 to 150,000 riel a month ($22 to $37), depending on their rank - a typical salary for a civil servant in Phnom Penh, but not enough to support a family. Sopheak believes the low pay leads to the ever-present rumors of corruption.

Sopheak said he doesn't know if the firefighters receive money from the people. He did not deny that at fires money is sometimes exchanged, but said it was not the firefighters who demanded it but the local police or other officials.

"I don't understand why this rumor persists," he said. "The people themselves say they want to work for the government or customs or some kind of official job because they know they will get more money. There is much corruption in Cambodia but still people only talk about corruption in the fire service."

Sopheak said the fire service has a policy not to ask for money but people sometimes show their gratitude after the fire is extinguished and give them food and water - and sometimes a little money too. "But we don't ask," he said.

This article first appeared in the Phnom Penh Post

Letter From Phnom Penh

Rainy season has started, and the city’s not wearing it well. Water washes off newly paved streets and into drainage that no longer copes. It coughs up the deluge, and the streets fill quickly with water stained by excrement, oil and mud.

Phnom Penh has always been subject to flooding. Built on a fragile wetland at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers, the city knows water as both its life force and its greatest threat. Phnom Penh’s original architects – the country’s French colonial masters – understood the complex hydrology of the site and compensated with a network of canals and drains flowing into the lakes and ponds that caught the rivers’ overspill. But with development comes concrete, and in recent years some of the canals have been filled, as have the lakes. The floods, I’m told, are getting worse.

In colder climes rain can be unremittingly grim – a reason to stay in bed – but in the tropics it carries the effervescence of spring. I have been in Cambodia for half a year now, working for newspapers here and around the region, and after a long impossibly hot dry season, when only the flies are dim-witted enough to move at haste, the rain is welcomed, despite the floods.

Water animates Cambodia: it gave the ancient Angkorian culture riches enough to conquer Southeast Asia, and today still, as clouds ink out the sun, the countryside comes alive. Soon the Mekong will become so bloated its sheer weight will force the smaller Tonle Sap to reverse its flow and return to whence it came, the Boeng Tonle Sap – Southeast Asia’s largest lake. As the river reverses, the lake floods land bleached by months of fierce sun, returning it to a fertile state when the waters recede.

But in the rain Phnom Penh struggles. The city once known as the Pearl of Asia and the Paris of the East, because of its orderly tree-lined avenues and French colonial architecture, is still unquestionably charming. Situated as it is on the river, the city was built on a low-rise scale that makes it seem more human than its regional neighbours, while the frangipanis and flame trees that line the streets give off a gloriously pungent tropical fragrance. But the growing slums and decrepit decaying colonial villas, with peeling paint and caved-in roofs, betray the tragedy and horror of the country’s recent past and the privations and poverty of the present.

Until it was caught up in the conflagration engulfing neighbouring Vietnam, Cambodia had enjoyed relative peace and prosperity after gaining independence in 1953. But between 1969 and 1973 the US dropped more than half a million tonnes of high explosives on eastern Cambodia: more than three times the quantity dropped on Japan during the Second World War. Out of that inferno emerged the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge revolutionaries, who defeated the American-backed government in 1975. When they entered Phnom Penh, French missionary François Ponchaud said the soldiers marched silently through the city as if it were a forest. ‘I had a sinking sensation that a slab of lead had suddenly fallen onto the city,’ he later wrote.


For the Khmer Rouge leadership, these boys and girls from the country, who didn’t know what money was and had never seen a car, were the purest, most authentic expression of the Khmer gene pool – carrying on their worn, expressionless faces an almost primal virtuosity. They were to be the mould into which Khmer society would be pressed. The soldiers ate toothpaste and drank from toilet bowls, thinking them wells; some tried to drink from cans of motor oil. They refused to eat from tin cans, threw money to the waters of the Mekong, and stripped vehicles of their tyres to make rubber sandals. At the airport they pulled bombers apart with their bare hands. ‘They would have eaten them if they could,’ one resident wrote.

For the soldiers, the city dwellers were the enemy: the vile bourgeoisie, who had lived in comfort and disinterest while the rural population suffered under American bombs and fought against the ‘imperialists and reactionaries’. The city itself was despised. ‘The city is bad because there is money in the city,’ a Khmer Rouge cadre told Ponchaud. ‘People can be reformed, but not cities.’

After a brutal five-year civil war in which half a million people died and tremendous atrocities were committed by both sides, the fall of Phnom Penh was marked not by mass killings – that came later – but a forced exodus. On the pretext the city was to be bombed, the soldiers ordered the residents to leave, and no one was spared. Hospitals were emptied. The sick, crippled, elderly and infirm joined the mass of humanity marching out into the countryside in the ghastly April heat. Two and a half million people were expelled with no more than a few hours’ notice. The cortege would become a mosaic of misery and death, and the empty capital was left to decay: boulevards were dug up by the soldiers and put to use as gardens; the jungle began to reclaim abandoned villas, which were used to house animals. The city – like the people – still bears the scars of this period and of the abject poverty and intermittent warfare of the decades that followed the Vietnamese victory over the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

When more than a fifth of a population perishes, a part of everyone is dead. It’s impossible to experience Phnom Penh and not feel the brooding weight of the recent past: here the nightmare of history is keenly felt.

But if there is one place in the city that seems removed, it is Independence Monument. The imposing ochre monolith at the intersection of two major boulevards stands serenely, seemingly untouched by the chaos that Cambodia has witnessed since the monument was completed in 1960. Adorned with a profusion of nagas, the protective serpents of Hindu mythology, the structure pays homage to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, as well as to ’the jewel of Khmer architecture’, the Angkorian temple at Banteay Srei. Designed by Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann, Independence Monument is an example of what’s become known as New Khmer Architecture: a unique synthesis of post-war European modernism and Angkorian vernacular.

Vann, the first Cambodian architect to be trained in Europe, was the leading figure in this short-lived movement, which emerged in the years following independence and expired with the onset of war. In a kind of Asian Bauhaus, the designers and architects of this period worked together in an attempt to adapt international styles to the heat and humidity of their homes.

Patronized by his monarch, King Sihanouk, Vann spearheaded a campaign of urban development that was the envy of Asia. From universities to sports facilities, the architect created more than a hundred public projects throughout Cambodia, including the 1964 National Sports Centre, constructed before Kenzo Tange's Olympic Stadium in Tokyo. Vann’s complex still stands today, although it is being encircled by commercial developments at an ever-increasing rate. The large ornamental pools of the Sports Centre imitate the reservoirs around Angkorian temples, while the zigzag roofline – a Vann motif – enables the flow of air and filters the light.


Vann’s major influence was Le Corbusier. ‘His buildings are like sculptures in the way they celebrate depth and space, as well as light and darkness,’ he said of the Swiss architect. His Institute of Foreign Languages is a small circular building with an indented concrete roof that seems to almost float in a circular glass wall. The careful location of windows filters the light, infusing the interior with a soft ambience. The form of the building was inspired by the traditional Khmer woven palm-leaf hat still worn throughout the countryside.


Vann was one of the few architects of the period to survive the Khmer Rouge, but despite increasing international admiration, the 80-year-old architect is largely shunned by today’s autocratic rulers, while his buildings, unprotected, face demolition. The Preah Suramarit Theatre was a masterpiece of concrete plasticity, with staircases suspended over shallow pools of water. Commissioned by Sihanouk in 1966 to promote Cambodia's performing arts, the theatre was gutted by fire in 1994 and remained in a ruined state for more than a decade. Despite talk of refurbishment, the theatre has been sold and awaits the bulldozers. It is likely to be replaced by a conference hall and TV tower.

Almost everywhere you look, there are bulldozers and lorries edging out the old and bringing forth the new. Wooden scaffolds rise around steel and concrete frames as the new Phnom Penh begins to mimic the growth of its Asian neighbours: cookie-cutter glass and concrete development, built cheap and fast. In a youthful society, so desperate to emerge from its 20th-century nightmare, old is ugly. It takes a special set of experiences to find these nondescript edifices beautiful, but many Khmer see them as such. Glass and concrete evoke progress and solidity, which give the Khmer good cause to rejoice. Given the horrors of the past, it is hard to begrudge them this sense of satisfaction.

Last year Cambodia enjoyed its third year of double-digit economic growth, and signs of wealth abound in the capital: not just modern apartment buildings, but new shopping centres that trade in luxury goods. Even the odd Hummer can be seen parked and heavily guarded outside nightclubs popular with the nouveau riche – those families who have profiteered from the last decade of economic growth, corruption, or both.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that 35 per cent of the population live on less than US$0.45 a day, mainly because 92 per cent of the poor live in rural areas – along rugged, poorly maintained roads where Hummers rarely go. Since 1993, half the government’s budget has been underwrittenone is not by foreign aid – now amounting to billions of dollars – but exactly where that money has g clear as the city still struggles to provide its inhabitants with even the most basic services. The city of around 1.5 million (no one is exactly sure) is served by a paltry eight fire engines, all antiquated, and an ageing fire service that hasn’t been reinforced since it was formed in 1993. Like all civil servants, firemen are paid around $35 a month, not enough to support a family. When called to a fire, they turn on the hoses only if occupants can afford to pay – otherwise the building burns.

For the poor then, who inhabit the sprawling slums, the rains carry a dividend: whether accidental or deliberate (the authorities are known to use fire as a means to clear sites for development), rainwater dampens the threat of fire. But rain doesn’t wash away corruption, which remains a way of life, and, as always, it’s those at the bottom who suffer its most deleterious effects. ‘The marrow has pips: why has man no heart?’ asks a Khmer proverb. Buddhist detachment, in the form of indifference, pervades Cambodian life. But the indifference of the richest 20 per cent, which today own 70 per cent of Cambodia’s land, is more like blindness.

The rain is pelting the surface of the lake by which I sit and finish this letter. Some 5000 families live around this lake in the heart of Phnom Penh, but last month the land was sold from beneath them for a fraction of its market value to one of the country’s more powerful women. Most of the families have lived around the lake since the Khmer Rouge were defeated. Then there was no property, and when the broken people returned to their abandoned city, they grabbed a home where they could. Now, without ownership papers, most of the city’s residents are effectively squatters, and officials use this historical anomaly as cause for eviction. They take the land, sell it to developers, and share the profits.

When the lake people are evicted they will likely be removed to sites at the city’s edge, which are far from schools and markets and lack all but the most basic amenities. It will be the largest eviction since the Khmer Rouge compelled everyone to leave.

The rain pelts on, and the lake rises. Change is coming quickly to Phnom Penh, but its charm is being muted, and in the flood of riches, too few are benefiting.

Best regards,
Allister Hayman

With thanks to Kunthea Yem, Sam Rith, Dan Poynton – and all those Cambodians who, with great generosity, shared their time and thoughts.

This article first appeared in Mark Magazine

Who's watching the forests now?

With the fallout from an excoriating Global Witness report on forest crime still reverberating through the Kingdom and across the world, the issue of how Cambodia's beleaguered forests are to be managed and monitored remains an ominous and unanswered question, Allister Hayman writes.

It's unclear how civil society, donors, the World Bank and the government hope to proceed - and whether the politically charged task of independent forest crime monitor will be kept or discarded.

In the Global Witness report "Cambodia's Family Trees" the UK-based environmental watchdog accused a "kleptocratic" ruling elite of pillaging Cambodia's forests. The government categorically denied the allegations and promptly banned the report.

Despite this, Minister of Information Khieu Kanarith said on June 7 the government would commission an investigation into the report's findings, with the former independent forest crime monitor, Swiss-based Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS), charged with heading the inquest. Global Witness publicly applauded the government's move and offered full cooperation. But since the announcement both Global Witness and SGS have heard nothing further. Thach Suon, the contract manager for SGS's Representative Office, said SGS's contract as independent monitor expired at the end of 2005 due to a lack of funding, and they had not been asked to investigate the allegations made in the Global Witness report.

Chea Samang, the deputy director of the Forest Administration - the government body charged with enforcing forest law - said neither MAFF nor the FA had conducted an investigation into the allegations made in the Global Witness report. "We have already explained many times that the [Global Witness] report is nothing more than an annoying sound," Samang told the Post. "It's false and has just made a lot of confusion." With the expiration of SGS's contract in December 2005 progress in the area of forest sector management is now stalled as the World Bank wrangles with the government over how best to proceed. At the same time donors and NGOs are reluctant to become mired in the monitoring role that has now become a political lightning rod.

Independent forest crime monitoring was introduced to Cambodia in 1999, following mounting international concern at the decimation of the Kingdom's forests. The World Bank set up a $5 million Forest Concession Management and Control Project (FCMCP) with three major aims: forest crime prevention, detection and suppression.

According to a 2006 Overseas Development Institute report, a number of options were considered for the independent monitor (IM), including private sector certifiers and NGOs, but the report concluded that it was difficult to interest the private sector "as the reputational risks were felt unlikely to be compensated for by the expected renumeration."

Ultimately, the World Bank offered UK-based NGO Global Witness to the government as the IM, in an arrangement endorsed by the government but paid for by donors. According to the ODI report, the appointment of Global Witness was made at the insistence of the donors and leveraged through a series of conditions concerning forest management set out in the World Bank's $30 million loan to the government in early 2000. The conditions concerning the forest management needed to be met in order for the government to qualify for the release of the loan's second $15 million tranche.

"Global Witness had been an implacable critic of the government, particularly Prime Minister Hun Sen and those close to him, and had systematically exposed and dismembered the political economy of forest enterprise, corruption and bad governance in the country, often in telling detail," the ODI report stated. "The appointment must have been a bitter pill for the RGC to swallow."

Struggling forward

In 2003 the bitter pill became too much. Global Witness' first major report was banned and the organization deemed it unsafe to continue working in the country.

The government's termination of the IM's contract drew widespread criticism while the World Bank withheld the second tranche of its loan while they worked with the government to find a new monitor and a new working framework. Of ten organizations invited to bid, only SGS submitted a completed application.

At the time the company's bid was something of a surprise. When in 1997, pressure from the IMF had prompted the government to first seek an IM, SGS was rumored to have begun negotiations, but ultimately withdrew citing security concerns. The uncontested appointment of SGS was confirmed in December 2003 after several months of negotiations between the company and the government and some substantial amendments to the terms of reference for the IM.

Under the deal, SGS was hired by the FA at a cost of $425,000 per year, with the funds drawn from a World Bank loan. But the revised terms of reference constituted a far more restrictive mandate than those applied to Global Witness.

Funding for Global Witness was provided directly by international donors, with no involvement or contribution from government agencies. But with termination of Global Witness' contract, donors withdrew support and under the new framework SGS was hired and paid by the FA, whose performance they were also charged with scrutinizing. Global Witness and other NGOs were vocal in their criticism of the new framework, and called it a conflict of interest.

"Corruption within the FA runs deep and senior FA officials enjoy close links with prominent players in Cambodia's logging mafia," Mike Davis, a Global Witness campaigner told the Post in June 2004. "It is extremely naïve to think that SGS would not come under pressure from their employers to turn a blind eye to these underlying causes of forest crime."
The new terms of reference also restricted the ability of the IM to publicly release information prior to government review, while field inspections had to be facilitated by the FA and could not be carried out independently.

But SGS was open in its willingness to accept the conditions of the new mandate.

"Global Witness is an advocacy agency and therefore saw monitoring as a means of fulfilling their aim - saving the forests," Bob Tennent, then SGS Forest Project Manager told the Post in June 2006. "Thus they embarrassed the government on a number of occasions which led to their contract being terminated. We see our role as working with the government."

Having withheld the second $15 million loan payment after the termination of relations with Global Witness and the failure to meet other forest management related conditions, the World Bank disbursed the second tranche after the appointment of the new IM. But in 2005, the independent Inspection Panel of the World Bank received a complaint from the NGO Forum acting on behalf of local communities affected by forest concessions.

The Inspection Panel investigated the complaints and issued a report on March 30, 2006, which raised several concerns about the Banks engagement in the forest sector and concluded the FCMCP had drifted from its objectives and was no longer complying with the World Bank's safeguard policies.


The panel also raised concerns about the amended terms of reference of the IM, which conflicted with the FCMCP's objective to have "an independent monitor to provide a check on the accuracy of Government reporting."

In response to the Inspections Panel's report, the World Bank reviewed the situation of forest management and recommended changes to the terms of reference for the IM in order to ensure greater independence.

The Bank also recommended new reporting arrangements to ensure increased transparency and to avoid a conflict of interest.

But in December 2005 funding for the FCMCP expired, and with that the role of SGS also ended - making the Bank's responses to the inspection report redundant.

Future in doubt

Since then, the World Bank has struggled with the government to find a way forward in the forest sector. A recent World Bank progress update obtained by the Post, cited a "lack of political will to fight forest crimes" and stated that "a consensus has yet to emerge on a clear way forward."

The report also stressed "the importance of the Prime Minister providing leadership in this politically charged sector."

"The situation in Cambodia remains very challenging, but the Bank is committed to staying engaged with the Government and other stakeholders," the report stated - before adding, "It is still too early to propose a full re-engagement in the forest sector."

Peter Jipp, a senior natural resources management specialist at the World Bank would not say if the Bank planned to provide funding for a new IM.

Jipp said that the success of a forest monitor hinged not only on the terms of reference of the role, but on the organization's own objectivity.

"When the agency that performs the monitoring function simultaneously pursues an advocacy role or has some other competing commercial interest this can lead to accusations of bias and conflict of interest which tends to undermine trust and effective coordination among the various actors," he said.

The Cambodian government has long maintained that Global Witness had an agenda and were "biased" and "political." SGS vice-president George Bottomley, in a public statement defended SGS's performance in contrast to Global Witness by emphasizing their neutrality. In response, Global Witness claim their only agenda is to detect and report forest crime where and when it happens, and if that means identifying the perpetrators - no matter their position - they will do so. This Global Witness say was the task given to them as the original independent forest monitor in 1999.

The ODI report described the conflict as one of two distinct approaches. The report concluded that while Global Witness may have behaved in a "cavalier fashion," SGS's circumscribed role was ineffective.

The ODI report concluded that the most productive way forward would be to appoint an "SGS-type organization as the independent monitor but to ensure that NGO watchdogs are available and able to maintain pressure and oversight of the independent monitor."

Meanwhile, MAFF blame a lack of capacity for the dearth of progress in forest management.

"We have not been looking for a new independent monitor because we do not have the funding for it," said Lim Sokun, secretary of state at MAFF. "We have not decided yet what to do. We have restriction measures in place but their implementation is difficult as our management and resources on the ground are limited. Illegal logging is a hot issue for the government but the control of illegal logging is not strict enough and that's why it still happens."

As the government and the World Bank struggle to find a way forward, Cambodia's forests remain under threat - and for now, no solution is apparent.

This article first appeared in the Phnom Penh Post

'Cloggers,' the King Father and online dissent

A young fresh generation of Cambodians are beginning to explore the potential of the blogosphere to broaden out their hemmed in freedom of speech, Allister Hayman finds.

His Majesty King-Father Norodom Sihanouk started it. From the quietude of retirement he became the first Khmer blogger when he began punctuating Cambodian public life with regular website postings in 2002. The retired King was enjoying a global revolution in online self-publishing that has been likened to the invention of the printing press. Armed with easy-to-use software, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, bloggers, the theory goes, have become active media players - enabling dissent, enhancing freedom of expression and broadening democracy.

But despite the King Father's efforts, blogging developments in impoverished post-conflict Cambodia have been modest.

Global Voices Online, a forum of blogs from the developing world, lists no more than 30 blogs produced by Cambodians, not counting expatriates and Cambodians living abroad, but with 60 percent of the country's population under 25 and a rising urban middle class, the site is predicting the Cambodian blogosphere is "ready to take off."

If that's the case then Mean Lux can in a large part be held responsible. Lux, 28, became interested in blogging soon after it took off in Korea, Japan, and China and is a pioneer of "clogging" - as Cambodian blogging is known. In fact, he coined the term.

"I wanted to explore the technology and see how it could be used for the development of young people and the country," he said. "It is very interesting how blogging can change the political landscape. This technology gives some power to the people."

In June 2005, after receiving funding from the NGO Open Institute, Lux traveled through the provincial capitals and gave lessons on internet use and blogging. After the success of these sessions, he joined with four other Khmer bloggers and formed the Personal Information Technology Workshops (PITW).

With funding from a local internet-provider, the group approached universities and offered free sessions to students. The workshops have proved hugely popular, with tightly packed classrooms overflowing. "In Siem Reap we planned for 100 students and we ended up with more than 300 and had to do two sessions," Lux said.

Since August 2006, the PITW volunteers have conducted sessions at 13 universities, and have plans for another seven workshops. At some universities the sessions have been incorporated into the standard IT program.

Lux reckons the group has exposed more than 2,000 students to blogging. "We don't expect all of them to start blogging," he said. "Maybe only a few will. But it's just about giving them the information and the skills and the confidence. At the universities even the IT teachers don't know about blogs, so we're teaching them as well."

Personal or Political

Keo Kalyan, or Dee Dee, a 17-year-old Phnom Penh high school student, is one of the PITW volunteers. After starting out "clogging" in 2005, she now hosts one of the Kingdom's more popular blogs.

"I wanted to have my own website to share my ideas and my point of view about society and about what is happening and my life," she said. "It was also a way to improve my writing."

Dee Dee's blog is a glimpse into the life of an educated, motivated Khmer teenager - or a "School Girl Genius! Khmer-Cyberkid," as her blog is subtitled.

Recent posts include reflections on the dengue fever outbreak, musings on the capitals city's traffic problems, and an account of a trip to Rattanakiri province. Her blog has a regular audience of about 2,000 and has a high Google ranking.

"Mainly I post about good news and tell Cambodians about new things," she said. "But also about how we can improve things and our society, like picking up rubbish and not leaving it in the park. I wrote a piece about being a valuable citizen and that got many comments."

But like her fellow PITW volunteers, Dee Dee steers clear of politics.

"I don't really post about political issues, mainly just about my life as a high school student," she said.

The volunteers said most "cloggers" were aware of risks associated with discussing sensitive issues and were mainly interested in telling their own stories and opening up a dialogue with the world.

"People tend to talk about the personal and not the political," Hor Virak, 26, a PITW volunteer said. "We don't do anything about politics or our workshop will be banned. But it depends on each person's motivation as to what they'll write about."

One blogger who is mixing the personal with the political is Vanak Thom. "Suppress me no longer," he wrote on his site Blog by Khmer. "Allow me to freely write for expressing my opinion and interests through this blog for the world to read."

Thom, who says he is from Svay Rieng province and lives in Phnom Penh, writes about politics in the Kingdom and is critical of what he calls Cambodia's "current one strongman rule government."

"When I first started blogging in 2005, I was very afraid of saying anything offensive ... for fear of my life," he wrote. "But now I've come to realize if I'm afraid to post anything I feel it's not right about my country's policy, then my feeling would be suppressed."

Freedom of Expression

Currently Cambodia has no laws to regulate the internet. A draft law has been languishing in the corridors of power since 2004, but passing that could take some time, meaning that for now blogs devoted to politics such as Thom's, as well as dissident cartoonist Ung Bun Heang's Sacrava Toons site and the popular KI Media site, are freely available.

As was the Global Witness report on illegal logging, banned by the government, but easily downloaded from the UK-based environmental watchdog's web site.

Lux believes that to date the internet has not had enough impact for the government to take restrictive measures.

"How quickly they adopt the law will depend on the influence bloggers have and if they attack the government or not," Lux said.

"But the law will not be restrictive like China. To get donor money we must show the world we are a democracy."

"Currently the media law is 'perfect' and gives freedom of expression, but the government uses other means to monitor and control the media."

Minister of Information and government spokesperson Khieu Kanarith refused to comment to the Post about internet-related issues, but some advocates believe the web will be integral to the development of Cambodia's nascent democracy - and it's merely a matter of time before the government will be forced to address it.

"Through the internet we can get around the old media - TV, radio, newspapers -which are controlled," said Ou Virak, head of the Alliance for Freedom of Expression, a coalition of 28 NGOs.

"The government is unlikely to place restrictions on the internet just yet as penetration is low. But if usage can pick up as quickly as phone usage has then who knows what might happen."

The development of Unicode - software that enables users to type easily in Khmer - is opening up access to blogging for Cambodia's baby boom generation and may increase internet use.

"With Unicode, even if they can't write in English they can still share their story," said Be Chantra, 26, another PITW volunteer, who has been part of the Open Institute's program to develop Khmer open source software (Khmer OS).

Khmerized versions of popular software, including web browsers and design-ware, are now available for free from the Khmer OS site, and Unicode has been installed on the latest version of Windows.

"There is now an agreement with the Ministry of Education to use Khmer OS software in high schools from next year," Chantra said. "This is going to make blogging more accessible to young Khmers."

Chantra uses Unicode on his blog Trajoke to tell jokes. "When people read my blog I just want them to relax and laugh," he said. "If they are busy at work they can flick to my blog and read a Khmer joke in Khmer."

But the growth of blogging is still constrained by access: internet penetration in the Kingdom is one of the lowest in the region. Only a few high schools have computers, and most universities do not have services freely available to students.

The arrival of wireless broadband, or WiMAX, in the country last year may increase penetration. WiMax allows internet service providers to offer broadband internet speeds without needing to install telecommunications infrastructure, meaning the Kingdom can literally go wireless without first being wired.

Internet cafes are becoming ubiquitous in the capital and Siem Reap. But in the countryside, where 85 percent of the population live, things are less wired-only 10 percent of rural areas have access to electricity, let alone high-speed broadband.

But Lux believes that in time blogging will be as influential in Cambodia as it has been in other parts of the world.

"It hasn't developed into a scene where people are discussing major issues like in other countries," he said. "But I'm sure blogs will change the country. If people talk about issues that effect them in life and in society they will start a discussion and that opens up expression."

Ten years after, O'Smach soldiers on

Ten years after the last gasps of Cambodia's long decades of war Allister Hayman finds that the hill top town that saw out the last of the violence is still struggling to survive.

Spread-eagled between two hills, the town of O'Smach lies on the lip of the Dangrek escarpment in Cambodia's far northwestern province of Oddar Meanchey. The town is a long, dusty drive from Phnom Penh on a road hard without the rain and muddy and almost impassable with it. But it was to O'Smach that Funcinpec fighters fled following then-Second Prime Minister Hun Sen's Cambodian Peoples Party coup de main of July 5-6, 1997.

O'Smach still bears scars from the battle that raged ten years ago. Today, it's struggling to survive: visitors to the two casinos built to resuscitate the town are dwindling and the impoverished brother of Pailin and Poipet is increasingly dependent on cross-border trade and temporary migration, with many locals saying they may leave for good.

The town has had a troubled history. A natural fortress atop a craggy plateau, O'Smach was a base for anti-government forces in the 1980s and was home to large refugee camps that straddled the border. Then, ten years ago, a worse conflict came.

"It was a hard long battle that I will never forget," said Mom Oun, 57, a veteran of the fighting who still lives in O'Smach. "I never dream about it, but I don't forget it either. What I remember is when someone shot at me-I shot back."

In the two weeks that followed the fighting in Phnom Penh, Funcinpec troops fled, surrendered, or were routed. What first looked like the makings of a civil war stretching across the northwest quickly became a localized conflict along Route 68 to Samrong in what was then northern Siem Reap.

Oun, a professional soldier since 1980, was stationed in the RCAF Division 9 Headquarters based in Samrong and was part of an artillery division loyal to Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Under attack from CPP forces the royalist troops retreated up Route 68, blowing up bridges and mining the area to slow the CPP advance.


Under Funcinpec strongman General Nhek Bun Chhay's command, they mounted their final defense in O'Smach, laying thousands of mines to protect the enclave. As supplies dwindled, they built homemade mines from 250-liter drums, fertilizer, metal, glass, and nails. The mines were detonated when government troops approached.

"We worked very hard to lay as many mines as we could to protect ourselves," Oun said. "They killed and maimed a lot of soldiers, but kept us alive."

After a prolonged and furious close-range artillery battle, a stalemate ensued. The town was divided into two hills: the "Cambodian Hill" occupied by government forces and "O'Smach II," a hill hugging the Thai border occupied by Bun Chhay's forces, who were dug into deep bunkers.

Separated by a deadly stretch of no-mans-land, these hills became the fraught, malaria-infested home for thousands of soldiers over the next 18 months - and like malaria, the fighting flared in sporadic but intense bouts.

"It was some of the hardest fighting I have been involved in," Oun said. "There were some quiet periods as well but when it was bad it was very bad. The whole town was burnt and destroyed."

Refugees

On August 28, 1997, a stray shell from CPP positions fell into Thailand, killing one Thai soldier and injuring two others. Thailand had warned the factions to keep the fighting within Cambodia and retaliated with a barrage of artillery on CPP positions. The Thai government formally complained and Phnom Penh publicly apologized.

Meanwhile up to 30,000 refugees from the province had crossed the border into Thailand where they were housed in camps.

"The fighting started and we were very scared," Heng Dina, 38, an O'Smach resident recalled. "A lot of people died in the initial fighting, including children. My brother lost his leg after an explosion. Then the next day we went across the border to Thailand to a refugee camp."

An amnesty granted to Bun Chhay and his forces in late-1998 brought hostilities to an end, but as the soldiers put down their weapons, land grabbing ensued. Many of the fighters remained in town and locals still speak bitterly about returning to find their homes destroyed, their land taken.

Hean Sokun, 62, fled to Battambang when the fighting started. "When I came back my house had gone. Everything had been burnt or stolen and I had nothing left," she said.

Sokun eventually moved into the new market that was built as part of town's reconstruction.

Reconstruction

Two casinos opened in 2001 and O'Smach enjoyed something of a renaissance, with an influx of gamblers visiting from Thailand as well as migrant labor - particularly sex workers from Phnom Penh. In 2003, figures showed that up to 7,000 Thais were crossing the border to play the casinos on weekends.

"Business was good for the first few years. I was a dressmaker and had many customers. I sold jeans to Thai tourists," Sokun said. "But the last few years there have been less tourists and many people have moved to the Thai market."

On a recent day the new market was nearly deserted. Stallholders said it had been this way since 2004, when the Thai government, concerned about the number of Thais gambling, enforced tightened border controls.

Dina, who runs a stall selling pirated CDs of Thai and Cambodian music, said visitors to the market had all but evaporated.

"Before a lot of Thais came to the casino, but now you have to pay for a passport so only the rich come to play-and they don't come down to the market," she said. "Before we used to make about $250 per month but now we make very little. Sometimes we lose money."

Dina said many vendors had moved across the border to the Thai market, but she was planning to move to Battambang. "We just can't make a living here anymore," she said.

The same story echoed throughout the market. "I heard from relatives who used to live here that it was a good place to make money and for the first few years it was very good," said Duch Chivin, 47, who moved to O'Smach in 2001 from Kandal province and runs a restaurant in the market. "There were lots of people coming across the border but now it's getting very difficult. I have very few customers now."

Chivin said the town was too isolated to grow unless the government made the long-promised improvements to Route 68, which is unpaved and turns into a narrow, rocky, deeply rutted 4-wheel drive track as it climbs the steep incline to town.

"Hun Sen has talked about building a new road through to the border to improve the economy of the province," he said. "If the road is good, then tourists from Thailand could travel from here down to Siem Reap. But we don't know when that will happen. Some say that because this was a Funcinpec town, the government won't help us."

Funcinpec buried

If O'Smach was a Funcinpec enclave ten years ago, there are no obvious signs of that now - the town has had a CPP commune chief since 1998 and there is not a single Funcinpec billboard in sight.

"This area is CPP now. There's no Funcinpec - it's just normal now," Sokun said. "Anyway, it doesn't matter what the party is - I don't care about all of that anymore - we just want a good person for commune chief."

Ean Lieng has been the town's CPP commune chief since 1998 and was upbeat about O'Smach's prospects.

"When I arrived after the fighting the town was destroyed and there were mines everywhere," he said. "Almost everyday, people got injured by mines - even now from time to time people get injured. But O'Smach is more developed now: we have guesthouses, schools, health centers, and a police station."


According to the Cambodian Mine Action Committee (CMAC), Oddar Meanchey -which also includes the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng - was one of the most heavily mined provinces in the Kingdom, but now CMAC estimates up to 70 percent of the area has been de-mined.

"We don't really know how many mine fields there are or how big the area is so we de-mine according to what we're told by the local people," said Khem Sophoan, director general of CMAC. "They tell us where the mine fields are when they're discovered."

Unfortunately, a minefield is usually only discovered by someone stepping into it, and in O'Smach there are a high number of amputees.

Deputy Provincial Governor Chum Cheat said it was not just O'Smach that was struggling to emerge from the post-coup conflict but the whole province - and the casinos hadn't helped.

"Not many tourists are coming to Oddar Meanchey because of the border restrictions and the bad roads," he said.

"Better roads would make a big improvement. But the casino's don't give money to the province, it goes to the state, so we don't get any money from the casino for development."

Wracked by conflict a decade ago, O'Smach is now fighting for its future- but it is, at least, at peace.

Oun, who like many veterans settled in O'Smach, said he was happy now just to grow beans and corn.

"If there's peace and development I'm happy," Oun said. "I don't want to be involved in that kind of fighting again - when Khmers fight Khmers, only Khmers are killed. It was just the same as all the fighting. It always impacts on the people: when there's shooting, innocent people die."

This article first appeared in the Phnom Penh Post

Quiet revolution in banking

Slowly but inexorably Cambodians are beginning to remove their savings from under their thatch roofs to deposit them in banks, writes Allister Hayman.

Just after midnight on a recent Sunday, two men on a motorbike whipped past Sok Sreypheap and grabbed the gold chain around her neck. It broke as she was pulled off the bike onto Phnom Penh's Sothearos Boulevard and the thieves sped off with their bounty.

Sreypheap, not her real name, escaped with mild grazing. But the chain, valued at over $200, represented her personal savings.

Sreypheap, 23, a waitress, works two jobs and earns about $110 a month. After expenses she sends about $20 a month home to her family in Kampong Cham province. The little left over she had saved at home until she bought her gold chain.

"This is the kind of story I just hate to hear," said John Brinsden, vice-chairman of Acleda Bank. "We come across this thing all the time and this is why we want people to deposit money."

With new innovations, the banking sector is bracing for a quiet revolution. According to the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC), total deposits in the Kingdom's banking system grew by 40 percent in 2006, with a total number of accounts growing to nearly 300,000. This is still a small proportion of the population, but significant growth in a country where about 35 percent of people live below the poverty line and distrust of banks is pervasive.

"[The growth] demonstrates that public confidence in the banking system has been increasing markedly and banking operations have been fairly and efficiently competitive," said Chea Chanto, the governor of NBC.

There are now 20 banks operating in Cambodia, with the major players reporting healthy growth.

Since converting from a small micro-finance NGO to a fully-fledged commercial bank in 2003, Acleda has enjoyed rapid growth with deposits doubling each year and that trend is projected to continue in 2007. Brinsden said while the overwhelming majority of Acleda's deposit growth is from first-time customers, it remains a constant battle to win trust.

"People will still say they prefer the risk of being robbed than using the bank," Brinsden said. "That's the extent to which there is a lack of faith in banks."

After decades of conflict - and under the Khmer Rouge a period without money - a series of sudden bank liquidations in the late nineties exacerbated a widespread mistrust of banks. With a large number of depositors losing their savings, the banking collapses reinforced a culture of in-home savings, where cash is often transferred into gold or other assets.

But according to a study by the Canadian Cooperative Association, Cambodians' lose 15 percent of their at-home savings each year due to fire, theft and water damage - or through debased gold and jewelery, or the loss of assets like livestock that were marked for short-term savings. The study estimated the total loss to be $60 million - money lost not only to each family, but to the Kingdom's economy.

"We try to explain to people the risk of storing money in their homes," Brinsden said of Acleda's marketing division. "We explain that not only will their money be safe in the bank but it will be used to provide loans to small businesses to help economic growth."

ANZ Royal is the new player. Opening in 2005 the bank has been leading the way with innovations in electronic banking. ANZ Royal was the first bank in Cambodia to introduce 24/7 banking services to customers with internet banking and a network of on and off-site ATMs. ANZ Royal are yet to release results for the 2006 financial year, but the bank states it is now the third largest in Cambodia in terms of deposits. "We have brought trust, international standards of governance, convenience, innovation and superior customer service to Cambodia," said ANZ Royal CEO Dean Cleland.

Canadia Bank showed total deposits more than doubling from $8 million in 2005 to $19 million at the end of 2006. Vattanac Bank also reported strong growth over the previous fiscal year, with the number of customers doubling and deposits reaching $36.7 million.

A senior representative at Cambodia Asian Bank (CAB), who spoke on condition of anonymity, said growth at CAB was healthy but the number of accounts in the banking sector overall- about 2 percent of the population-remained extremely low. Growth in the sector was sharp, the banker said, only because it was founded on such a low base.

"The growth is coming from two main sources: increased overseas investment, with money flowing into the country, as is the case across the region, and the boom in the land market," the banker said. "People are buying and selling land, the prices are rocketing and people are making money. It's the already well-off who are getting more wealthy that are using are banks, not so much everyday Cambodians."

The major commercial banks are still largely concentrated in the urban centers, where the Kingdom's economic growth has been founded. But Acleda's reach is more extensive: from Oddar Meanchey to Svay Rieng, new banks are being built on Acleda-owned land. "It's important to show that we are here for the long term. That's how you win trust," Peter Kooi, a director of the bank, said. "If you rent a building the people think you could pack up and leave tomorrow, which is what has what happened before."

Acleda uses savvy marketing to sell their products to the rural population. In the branches TVs play music videos of famous Chapei players singing songs that explain to a largely illiterate rural population what a savings account is; what a loan is and why the bank is a better bet than storing money in your home or borrowing from a loan shark. "Deposit growth has been healthy and winning trust is the key," Brinsden said. "The next step is to get customers' salaries directly transferred into their accounts."

But the revolution in the banking sector remains a quiet one and the tipping point, it seems, is still some way off. Despite the loss of her savings Sreypheap, along with millions of other Cambodians, remained unconvinced about the benefits of banking. "I just don't have enough money to use a bank," she said. "I was just unlucky."

This article first appeared in the Phnom Penh Post

The rich, the poor and the income gap

In the first of a two part special report Allister Hayman looks at the failure of the Cambodian Government and international donors to address the ever widening gap between rich and poor.

The Hummer crawls to a stop in a Phnom Penh street. The uniformed driver hops from the vehicle and crosses the road to buy a plastic bottle of petrol.

Motodops point and laugh as the driver tops up the empty tank. Inside the SUV, teenage girls squirm in embarrassment.

The Hummer, Arnold Schwarzenegger's favorite auto and America's classic symbol of conspicuous consumption, is the vehicle of choice for some of Phnom Penh's nouveau riche - those families who have benefited most from the last decade of economic growth, corruption or both.

In 2006, Cambodia enjoyed its third year of double-digit economic growth, continuing a "robust" trend that makes it one of the best performing economies in the region. Growth is set to continue this year, with 9 percent predicted.

Signs of wealth abound in Phnom Penh: modern apartment buildings rise out of bulldozed squats; a new shopping center trades in luxury goods; even the one or twoLamborghini - valued at $250,000 each - can be seen parked and heavily guarded outside night clubs popular with the new elite.

It's sometimes easy to forget that 35 percent of the population live on less than $0.45 per day, mainly because 92 percent of the poor live in rural areas - at the end alongrugged, poorly maintained roads where the Hummers rarely go.

The laughter as the monstrous SUV ran out of petrol was a rare moment of equality in a country increasingly marked by the opposite.

Poverty Reduction Slow

According to the World Bank, Cambodia enjoyed an average annual growth of 8.2 percent over the decade from 1993 to 2004, but overall poverty decreased from 47 percent to a mere 35 percent - just above 1 percent per annum.

Other experts claim that even this low assessment overstates the case.

Ear Sophal, a Cambodian development specialist, argued in the April edition of the Asian Journal of Political Science, that there was "lack of robustness" in the World Bank's findings and suggested a poverty reduction of 4 percent was more accurate.

In any case, as a large proportion of the population live marginally above the poverty line, the figures are sensitive.

As Sophal noted, if the 2004 poverty line of 1,826 riel was increased by a mere 10 percent - just 183 riel - the poverty rate would jump from 35 percent to 41.6 percent.

What is clear is that poverty reduction has been painfully slow relative to economic growth, and further, inequality has significantly increased.

The average per capita consumption of the richest 20 percent of the population - the urban elite - has risen by 45 percent over the last ten years, compared to an 8 percent rise for the poorest quintile. Economic indicators of disparity make the country one of the most unequal in the region.

The urban-rural divide has also widened. In Phnom Penh poverty fell by over half from 11 percent to 5 percent in the decade to 2004, but rural poverty fell only 9 percent from 43 to 34 percent.

Rural-Urban drift

The three pillars of economic growth - the garment sector, tourism and construction - are grounded in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap town, and according to the Cambodian Development Resource Institute (CDRI), which will release a major report on the rural economy next month, this concentration is causing a rural-urban drift that is changing rural livelihoods - and not necessarily for the better.

"Opportunities for the rural poor in urban centers consist of mainly casual unskilled jobs, usually during the dry season, such as construction, moto driving or security guards" said Chan Sophal, senior researcher at CDRI. "As well as women working in garment factories. These workers send remittances home - with garment factory workers in particular sending a large proportion of their wages. But these wages are not making a significant impact on rural development."

According to the CDRI study, which focused on ten villages across the country over a three-year period, migrant labor was an increasingly significant aspect of rural livelihoods, with some 13 percent of rural households receiving remittances from family members in 2004.

This figure is likely to have increased in the last three years, with the continued expansion of the urban economy and the limited economic opportunities of rural communities.

While many migrant workers continue to use jewellery stores, money-lenders and taxi drivers, to remit their money, there's been significant growth in domestic bank transfers.

One of the Kingdom's leading banks, Acleda, has seen domestic transfers double each year for the past six years. Last year, $565 million was transferred domestically. This year the bank is projecting a billion dollars in transfers - or about 15 percent of GDP.

According to Acleda, about 50 percent of the transfers flow in and out of Phnom Penh - with 65 percent of those running out of the capital to the provinces and 35 percent coming into the city. The remaining 50 percent flow between provinces.

Of the total number of domestic transfers through Acleda last year, about 37 percent were less than $500 - which constituted about 3 percent of the annual dollar amount. The remaining transfers were small to large business or corporate remittances.

Vann Sarouen, Acleda's Siem Reap provincial manager, said while the major flow of transfers was from Siem Reap town to the capital for business, there had been a sharp increase in small transfers, with about 30 percent of total outward remittances less than $100.

"These small amounts are from seasonal workers who live in other provinces," Sarouen said. "More people are beginning to trust the bank instead of using private means."

Little "spillover" from money flow

Despite the increase in money flow, the CDRI study suggested there was limited "spillover" to the 85 percent of the population who live in the countryside. Sophal said the average annual remittance equated to about $80 per household, which is less than 10 percent of household consumption.

"The amounts being sent by migrant workers are not going to make a miracle - $20 to $30 per month is not going to improve livelihoods significantly," Sophal said. "In the large part it is simply aiding the subsistent lifestyles of the dependent families. It's preventing them from falling deeper into poverty, which is of course a positive thing -without the jobs they would be worse off - but it rarely leads to sustainable improvements."

Sophal said of those living above the poverty line, about 30 percent were only marginally above. For these families, sudden shocks such as theft, corruption, crop failure - but particularly health problems - could quickly reduce them to destitution.

"It's these families who benefit most from remittances as the extra income enables them to subsist and to cope with such shocks," Sophal said.

When two or three family members were selling their labor - for example, two daughters working in garment factories - then families could be brought out of poverty and even save, Sophal said.

But according to the CDRI study, only about 10 to 20 percent of families were able to improve their situation through labor selling and remittances.

"Not everybody is able to save and for those that can the savings are either used for security or for asset building: more livestock, a moto, a TV, bicycles and especially home improvements. It's usually only the already well-off or upwardly mobile families that use savings to establish small businesses," Sophal said.

To improve a thatch house - a sign of poverty - to a wooden house with a tin roof, would take an average family up to seven years of saving, and remittances could contribute to this, Sophal said.

"But while their living condition has improved, the family may not have diversified their income source, which is the key to prosperity. It's not aiding long-term development. In the main the incomes from remittances are not even a short-term solution to poverty reduction, they are merely a stop-gap," Sophal said.

But remittances are often used to provide family members with an education.

Though educational attainment figures in Cambodia are some of the lowest in the region, with only 18 percent of men and 9 percent of women in the work force with more than a primary school education, primary enrolments in rural areas have increased by 50 percent in the past decade and lower secondary enrolments by 62 percent.

Despite the government's 2000 introduction of a universal free enrolment policy up to Grade 9, the CDRI study found that "informal" payments for schooling at all levels were a financial burden on many families.

Garment factory workers who spoke to the Post, proudly boasted they were helping send their siblings to school.

Key Ratanak, 19, from Kompong Cham, lives in a tiny one-room apartment in Phnom Penh's outskirts, with four other girls from her village. They all work in the same garment factory and over a 60-hour week, including overtime, make about $60-70 per month. They send about $20-30 home every two months through relatives or a taxi.

"The money makes life a little easier for my family as they can buy more food," Ratanak said. "And it helps keep my brothers and sisters in school."

But according to the CDRI study, poor households in rural areas have not been the major beneficiaries of the garment sector's growth.

Most garment factory jobs require "informal" recruitment fees and literacy, which excludes the poorest families, especially as it's girls who leave school first to help their family. Over 70 percent of the Cambodia's entire female work force are illiterate or have less than a primary school level education.

"The rapid growth of the garment sector has benefited many households, but these have not necessarily been poor households and very rarely the poorest," Sophal said. "Ultimately, there is very little linkage between growth in the urban areas and growth in the rural areas. The wages earned in construction and garment factories are not 'poverty reducing' wages - it simply isn't enough to make a significant impact."

Rural-rural inequality

The CDRI study found that not only was urban growth and labor migration failing to "spill over" into rural development, but there was rising inequality in and between rural communities.

While communities in good locations with fertile soils and access to irrigation prosper, isolated communities, without good roads and access to markets and other out of village opportunities, are in decline.

Sophal said areas adjacent to the Tonle Sap and plateau and mountainous areas, including Kratie and Kampong Speu, were suffering significantly higher levels of poverty than the rest of the country, with rates of up to 56 percent.


The study also found significant inequality emerging within villages. "A village study group told us that the rich keep on getting richer: they're increasing the price of pots and jars they're trading. While the poor get poorer: they keep on decreasing the price of charcoal and firewood they're producing," Sophal said.

The poorer communities were previously reliant on natural resources as their 'safety net', but with the degradation of forests and fishery stock through over exploitation and the increasing concentration of land and resources in the hands of the rich, these villages were now facing increasing poverty and destitution.

Sophal said in these villages the 'rich' are able to take control of the natural resources in collusion with the authorities.

"The poor bear the brunt of weak governance and corruption, while the rich either pay up or actively use corruption and impunity to their advantage, with natural resource dependent communities the most affected," Sophal said.

Sophal said landlessness and land concentration were an increasing problem for rural communities. In 2003, 70 percent of land was owned by the richest 20 percent of the population. With that trend continuing, there are now large tracts of fenced off land in rural areas owned by the wealthy for speculative purposes that remain uncultivated. Poorly defined land laws mean absentee owners are reluctant to lease the land for fear the lessees will later claim title.

With a lack of plots to cultivate, selling labor has become an increasingly important source of income for the poor. The very poor sell labor within the village, often for credit and then part payment, while those with the capacity migrate either to the urban centers or the Thai border regions.

According to CDRI, an increasing number of rural Cambodians are crossing the Thai border to work for one to two month periods or longer, in agriculture, construction and other unskilled work. The migrants can earn up to $150 per month and can remit about $100 to their families after several months work.

Other migrants are daily workers: either cart-pullers, who bring back goods from Thai markets, smugglers, or laborers who cross in the morning and return late at night.

Exact figures on Thai migration are largely speculative as much of the movement is informal but some estimate up to 200,000 or more migrants cross the border each year.

Of the villages studied in the CDRI report, about 70 percent of adults engaged in wage labor outside of the village from March to September - including 14 percent in the Thai border regions and 8 percent in Thailand. This figure fell to 37 percent from October to March.

But Sophal said the migration within and without the country was more a consequence of "push factors" - poverty, population growth, natural resource depletion, unemployment, landlessness and land concentration - than the "pull" of opportunity or demand.

"It's mainly a function of necessity not of choice and reflects the failure of rural development strategies," he said.

Growth fails to reduce poverty

The failure of rural development and the consequent increase in migration has economists concerned.

According to the World Bank, Cambodia will not achieve its Millenium Development goal target of halving the 1993 poverty rate by 2015 with its current growth rates - unless more growth comes from agriculture.


Prime Minister Hun Sen, in his opening address to the Second Cambodian Economic Forum (SCEF) on May 9, which focused on the rural economy and agricultural development, highlighted the country's robust economic growth but said "improving Cambodia's rural economy and livelihoods remains a daunting challenge."

But Hun Sen said the government had "multiplied its efforts to implement the agenda for poverty reduction which is the core of all national policies and strategies."

Keat Chhon, Minister of Economy and Finance, said agricultural development was central to the government's five-year Rectangular Strategy for development.

"Our economic policies aim at diversification of the economy with more emphasis on agriculture and agro-industry," he said. "We need to modernize the agriculture sector, improve productivity and increase value added of our agricultural products through agro processing."

But panelists at the forum questioned the implementation of the government's rural development policies and said greater urgency was needed.

Robert Glofcheski, the chief economist for UNDP in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, raised the specter of uncontainable rural-urban drift as a result of failed rural development policies and rising inequality.

"Land is becoming so concentrated so rapidly that vast numbers of rural poor are beginning to seek life in the cities, but the economy has not had the chance to develop the capacity to host them," he said. "70 percent of available land is concentrated in the 20 percent of people who are better off and this is dangerous in a society at this stage of development."

While a certain level of inequality is to be expected in the transition from a centrally controlled, poor economy to one based on market principles, the forthcoming World Bank Equity Report suggests that in conditions of sustained economic growth, inequality should be paralleled by significant overall poverty reduction.

If rising inequality coincides with limited poverty reduction - as is the case in Cambodia - then the lack of equity not only affects perceptions of the legitimacy of governance, but can also function as a brake on economic growth, the draft notes for the report stated.

The World Bank would not comment to the Post about the issues raised in the Equity Report, but at the SCEF Nisha Agrawal, the World Bank's Cambodia country manager, described the issue of rural development as the "hottest" in the Kingdom and criticized the implementation of the governments rural development policy as "too slow."

"I've been in Cambodia long enough to know when there is political will the government can move very quickly," she said. "You simply cannot have this rural urban drift happening without the necessary job creation."

While the incomes of garment factory workers and rice field workers rose last year, the Economic Institute of Cambodia's (EIC) latest report stated that the wages of the most vulnerable workers declined.

"Too many rural people are arriving in Phnom Penh looking for work," said Neou Seiha, the author of the EIC's latest report. "There is an influx of labor and not enough demand so incomes are falling. And the industrial sector is not providing enough jobs."

From 1993 to 2004 the industrial sector's share of the economy more than doubled to 29 percent - driven by the garment sector and construction - but despite this the sector still only employed about 8 percent of the work force.

The garment sector, which according to EIC produced a massive 91 percent of Cambodia's exports in 2006, has enjoyed significant growth since the US and EU measure to restrict China's exports was implemented in March 2005. But with that safeguard set to expire next year, Seiha said it was likely the sector would slow.

"The garment sector is unlikely to grow and certainly not fast enough to provide jobs for around 200,000-300,000 young Cambodians who enter the market each year," Seiha said. "It will remain in important industry but it will no longer be an engine of growth."

Despite predicting further economic growth of 9 percent in 2007, Seiha said EIC were less optimistic about the short-term future unless critical reforms were implemented to diversify the economy.

"Garment factories import all their raw materials and all the profits go to the Chinese owners," Seiha said. "The food that tourists eat is imported from Vietnam, because Cambodia can't guarantee enough production - so are the materials for construction. There's little linkage from these sectors to other industries that would create more jobs, growth and poverty reduction."

The EIC report stated that while the industrial and services sectors continued to grow, agriculture, which is central to the lives of the poor and accounts for 70 percent of the work force, declined significantly, from 13.4 percent growth in 2005 to 4.4 percent in 2006.

According to the World Bank, agriculture grew by a sluggish 3.4 percent over the decade to 2004. Rice production, which accounts for 88 percent of crops harvested, remains erratic and is subject to drought and flooding, with only 7 percent of arable land irrigated - the lowest rate in South East Asia. Paddy yields, though increasing, also remain the lowest in the region.

"The economy is at a critical stage of development. Land concentration and the failure of rural development, particularly agriculture, is creating a drift to urban areas, especially in the dry season," Seiha said. "But the new arrivals cannot be absorbed. The need for diversification of the economy and a focus on agricultural development has never been more pressing."

This article first appeared in the Phnom Penh Post