Cambodia’s recent history, and causes of poverty

Cambodia is one of the world's poorest nations.  Before being plunged into civil conflict in the 1970s, Cambodia had begun to industrialise, though most of the labour force was still engaged in agriculture.  The country was self-sufficient in food and produced exportable surpluses of its principal crops of rice and corn.  In spite of relatively low yields and a single harvest per year, Cambodia annually exported hundreds of thousands of tons of rice.
Civil unrest disrupted Cambodia's fledgling manufacturing industry and severely damaged road and rail networks.
The civil war from 1970 to 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, and the Cambodia-Vietnam War from 1978 to 1979 virtually destroyed Cambodia's economy.  By 1974, under wartime conditions, rice had to be imported, and production of Cambodia's most profitable export crop, rubber, fell off sharply.  The civil unrest also disrupted Cambodia's fledgling manufacturing industry and severely damaged road and rail networks.

In 1975 the newly installed Khmer Rouge government nationalized all means of production in Cambodia.  Money and private property were abolished, and agriculture was collectivized (ownership was transferred to the people as a group, represented by the state).  The Khmer Rouge Four-Year Plan, a utopian document drafted in 1976, envisaged multiple plantings of rice and a vastly expanded irrigation system.  The plan aimed to increase income from exports of rice and other products and to use this income to buy machinery with which to industrialize the country.  The Four-Year Plan was poorly thought out, brutally enforced, and unsuccessful.  Rice production rose slightly, but between 1976 and 1978, hundreds of thousands of people died from malnutrition, overwork, and mistreated or misdiagnosed diseases.  The Khmer Rouge executed hundreds of thousands more people whom they judged to be enemies of the regime.  The atrocities of the Khmer Rouge period decimated Cambodia's labour force.

After the Khmer Rouge was overthrown in early 1979, the government's grip on agricultural production loosened, and millions of Cambodians attempted to resume their lives as subsistence farmers.  By the mid-1990s Cambodia once again achieved self-sufficiency in rice production and began to export small quantities of rice.  The country's infrastructure improved gradually in the 1990s, largely due to massive infusions of foreign assistance.  Other sectors of the economy were less fortunate, however.  By 1995 the country's economy as a whole was performing at only 40 to 50 percent of its pre-1970 capacity.  For many visitors to the country, Cambodia's poverty is masked by the prosperity of sections of Siem Reap town.

Poverty in Cambodia is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon. Over 93% of the country’s total number of poor live in rural areas, 6.2% live in other urban areas, with a tiny percentage in urban Phnom Penh.  Cambodia must find ways of enhancing the productivity of the rural economy to accelerate the growth of rural incomes and opportunities.

The province with the highest poverty rate in 2004 was in Kompong Speu (57.2%) followed by Kompong Thom (52.4%) and Siem Reap (51.8%).  

Poverty rates are high among those whose household heads have little or no education.  Similarly, years of schooling and literacy of household heads are strongly related to poverty.  This shows the lack of human capital on the part of the poor and brings out the importance of investing in human capital as an effective means of fighting poverty in Cambodia.

In addition, poverty incidence is high among households whose heads earn their living as mining, agricultural and construction workers. Targeting agriculture, however, is most important as it accounts for 63% of the total number of the poor in the country.

[All information from the Royal Government of Cambodia's website]

Education, and agricultural development and support are key needs in and around Siem Reap, and many of the organisations are working to support the government’s activities in these areas.  This will enable local people to take better advantage of the opportunities that tourism brings.