Laying the
foundations for effective team work:
Diversifying diets
and crops in Cambodia
ACIAR has now started a five-year project to improve
productivity and livelihood security for farmers in Cambodia’s north-western
provinces of Banteay Meanchey, Battambong and Pursat, which together produce
27% of the country’s wet season rice.
These projects take a lot of planning and organisation
before the research can begin. At the end of last year a three-day workshop was
held in Phnom Penh to plan the Sustainable
Intensification and Diversification in NW Cambodia project (CSE/2015/044).
Cambodia is one of the world’s leading exporters of rice, a
common but low value crop, but farmers need to diversify and grow more
profitable foods.
Dr John Dixon, ACIAR’s Principal Advisor for the Cropping
Systems and Economics program, said: ‘We wish to diversify the diet—and the way
to do that is to diversify farming.’
After the
rice crop, farmers could use irrigation water available or soil moisture to
grow another crop such as oil seed or vegetables. Smallholders are very keen on fish ponds,
while ACIAR anticipates introducing some animal enterprises in another 10 to 15
years.
‘We’d like
to work with farmers to identify viable diversification options that are higher
value crops or livestock than rice,’ Dr Dixon said. ‘That will help to lift them out of the
long-term poverty trap.’
Last year’s ‘crisis’ showed that growing only rice is
unsustainable. Farmers were left with a
surplus which they had to sell at lower prices or which rice mills refused to
buy. Prices plummeted from US$250 per
ton in August to US$193 in September, and the government was forced to bail out
the farmers with a US$27 million grant.
Heavy clay soil makes it difficult to grow crops other than
rice, but even growing rice is difficult.
While the south-east has tractors and rice harvesting machines, the
north-west, where the project will be based, is less mechanised.
To make matters worse, neighbouring Thailand, Vietnam and
Burma’s rice industries are more competitive, while Cambodian farmers and small
businesses aren’t currently entrepreneurial.
Three interdependent and integrated planning workshops were
held, to get the project started - one a day.
The foresight workshop on Day
1 identified the trends and scenarios that underlined why diversification is as
important as intensification—and the importance of sustaining soils, water,
farm and business profits and local social systems.
Dr Dixon said: ‘This was an excellent exercise, because the
participants – the project members and related stakeholders – began to think
about what the future situation would be.’
The stakeholder
engagement workshop on Day 2 explored potential interactions between the
ACIAR project and the ongoing work of stakeholders in Cambodia, including
various Government agencies, local Universities, local companies (SM-Waypoint),
IRRI, the DFAT supported CAVAC and the IFAD supported ASPIRE.
The inception
workshop on Day 3 planned the project’s strategy for its first 12 months. This includes surveying smallholders and
businessmen, participatory appraisals, household surveys, establishing hubs of
farmers who will collaborate with the project, and training farmers and linking
them to the market.
‘The workshops were very successful,’ Dr Dixon said. ‘It piloted an innovation in terms of
inception workshops.’
ACIAR’s regional manager Dulce Simmanivong commented that
the workshops were a great way to initiate relationships with stakeholders,
some of whom are likely to become collaborators with the project during
implementation. She believed this model
should be tested in other ACIAR projects.
The workshops also developed a common understanding among project staff
and partners about the context and focus of the required research.
There is a lot of work behind the scenes before an ACIAR
project can start trialling new agriculture methods in a partner country, but
the preparation for this project is bound to pay off, with targetted
research plans.
Read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.